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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
To hear the candidates debate, you would think that their fight was over who could best beat Trump. But when Trump's billionaire twin Mike Bloomberg throws a quarter-billion dollars into an ad campaign to bypass the candidates actually running for votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, it's obvious that what really is at issue is the future of the Democrat Party. Bloomberg is banking on a brokered convention held by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which money votes. (If "corporations are people," so is money in today's political world.)
Until Nevada, all the presidential candidates except for Bernie Sanders were playing for a brokered convention. The party's candidates seemed likely to be chosen by the Donor Class, the One Percent and its proxies, not the voting class (the 99 Percent). If, as Mayor Bloomberg has assumed, the DNC will sell the presidency to the highest bidder, this poses the great question: Can the myth that the Democrats represent the working/middle class survive? Or, will the Donor Class trump the voting class?
This could be thought of as "election interference" – not from Russia but from the DNC on behalf of its Donor Class. That scenario would make the Democrats' slogan for 2020 "No Hope or Change." That is, no change from today's economic trends that are sweeping wealth up to the One Percent.
All this sounds like Rome at the end of the Republic in the 1st century BC. The way Rome's constitution was set up, candidates for the position of consul had to pay their way through a series of offices. The process started by going deeply into debt to get elected to the position of aedile, in charge of staging public games and entertainments. Rome's neoliberal fiscal policy did not tax or spend, and there was little public administrative bureaucracy, so all such spending had to be made out of the pockets of the oligarchy. That was a way of keeping decisions about how to spend out of the hands of democratic politics. Julius Caesar and others borrowed from the richest Bloomberg of their day, Crassus, to pay for staging games that would demonstrate their public spirit to voters (and also demonstrate their financial liability to their backers among Rome's One Percent). Keeping election financing private enabled the leading oligarchs to select who would be able to run as viable candidates. That was Rome's version of Citizens United.
But in the wake of Sanders' landslide victory in Nevada, a brokered convention would mean the end of the Democrat Party pretense to represent the 99 Percent. The American voting system would be seen to be as oligarchic as that of Rome on the eve of the infighting that ended with Augustus becoming Emperor in 27 BC.
Today's pro-One Percent media – CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times have been busy spreading their venom against Sanders. On Sunday, February 23, CNN ran a slot, "Bloomberg needs to take down Sanders, immediately." Given Sanders' heavy national lead, CNN warned, the race suddenly is almost beyond the vote-fixers' ability to fiddle with the election returns. That means that challengers to Sanders should focus their attack on him; they will have a chance to deal with Bloomberg later (by which CNN means, when it is too late to stop him).
The party's Clinton-Obama recipients of Donor Class largesse pretend to believe that Sanders is not electable against Donald Trump. This tactic seeks to attack him at his strongest point. Recent polls show that he is the only candidate who actually would defeat Trump – as they showed that he would have done in 2016.
The DNC knew that, but preferred to lose to Trump than to win with Bernie. Will history repeat itself? Or to put it another way, will this year's July convention become a replay of Chicago in 1968?
A quandary, not a problem
Last year I was asked to write a scenario for what might happen with a renewed DNC theft of the election's nomination process. To be technical, I realize, it's not called theft when it's legal. In the aftermath of suits over the 2016 power grab, the courts ruled that the Democrat Party is indeed controlled by the DNC members, not by the voters. When it comes to party machinations and decision-making, voters are subsidiary to the superdelegates in their proverbial smoke-filled room (now replaced by dollar-filled foundation contracts).
I could not come up with a solution that does not involve dismantling and restructuring the existing party system. We have passed beyond the point of having a solvable "problem" with the Democratic National Committee (DNC). That is what a quandary is. A problem has a solution – by definition. A quandary does not have a solution. There is no way out. The conflict of interest between the Donor Class and the Voting Class has become too large to contain within a single party. It must split.
A second-ballot super-delegate scenario would mean that we are once again in for a second Trump term. That option was supported by five of the six presidential contenders on stage in Nevada on Wednesday, February 20. When Chuck Todd asked whether Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar would support the candidate who received the most votes in the primaries (now obviously Bernie Sanders), or throw the nomination to the super-delegates held over from the Obama-Clinton neoliberals (75 of whom already are said to have pledged their support to Bloomberg), each advocated "letting the process play out." That was a euphemism for leaving the choice to the Tony-Blair style leadership that have made the Democrats the servants' entrance to the Republican Party. Like the British Labour Party behind Blair and Gordon Brown, its role is to block any left-wing alternative to the Republican program on behalf of the One Percent.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
anonymous [284] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 10:19 pm GMT
Ironically the DEM party has become the Oligarchs party the DEMs debased themselves abandoning the WORKING class long time ago. The DEM recipe for WHITE conservative deplorables is something like DETROIT model a former city the cradle of the Auto/industrial manufacturing is now a desolated city bankrupt, violence, dilapidated etc.AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 11:17 pm GMTThis is the PLAN for all WHITE anglo saxon deplorables goyim Illiterate, Unemployed, violent and give them all the (tax subsidized) drugs opiods, pornography, that their subhuman hallow souls desired white genocide/
There is no quandary. The US democracy has long become "one dollar – one vote". Those who still believe that Dems represent working people should not take IQ test to avoid being deeply disappointed.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
Sean , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 8:28 pm GMT
AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 11:17 pm GMTAs Aristotle noted already in the 4th century BC, oligarchies turn themselves into hereditary aristocracies
Sounds like a reading of the thesis of Piketty, yet hereditary aristocracies must be endogamous and–if they are to keep wealth in the family–consanguineous, which does not have much appeal for modern elite, for sound genetic reasons . Also Water Scheidel show in his Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, the failure brought about competitive fragmentation and selection. Political, economic, scientific, and technological breakthroughs followed and allowed Europe to take off "It wasn't until Europe "escaped" from Rome that it launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world. What has the Roman Empire ever done for us? Fall and go away".
Piketty himself was clear in his first book that the two world wars brought about a huge leveling of wealth. But cities were levelled too. Piketty went on to assert–in his second and even weightier tome–that a struggle for equality has been the great driver of human progress. Yet from doorstopper of Walter Scheidel
the Neolithic long before the Bronze Age conquests, the "natural" human condition seems to have been inequality, while actual change to that condition often came in the aftermath of war (or plague and famine). Reduction of inequality by ideologically driven political change was often violent and ultimately at the cost of widespread pauperisation.Studies of social status within ethnically homogenous groups show that genetics plays a substantial role in outcomes. Thus if elites and underclasses are drawn from parent populations by selective recruitment, they will differ genetically from the general population. It will take many generations for those differences to dissolve. This is not an "ugly" fact. It is not a "beautiful" fact. It is just a fact. This fact helps explain why it is so hard for societies using the levers of social policy to eliminate group disparities in outcomes. It is a fact that we should be aware of in thinking about inequalities of income and wealth.Studies of social status within ethnically homogenous groups show that genetics plays a substantial role in outcomes. Thus if elites and underclasses are drawn from parent populations by selective recruitment, they will differ genetically from the general population. It will take many generations for those differences to dissolve. This is not an "ugly" fact. It is not a "beautiful" fact. It is just a fact. This fact helps explain why it is so hard for societies using the levers of social policy to eliminate group disparities in outcomes. It is a fact that we should be aware of in thinking about inequalities of income and wealth.
There is no quandary. The US democracy has long become "one dollar – one vote". Those who still believe that Dems represent working people should not take IQ test to avoid being deeply disappointed.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
Realist , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 12:25 pm GMT
9/11 Inside job , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 12:43 pm GMTIn a struggle between oligarchy and democracy, something must give
America hasn't been a democracy for decades there is no contest oligarchy (Deep State) won a long time ago. The only struggle is to continue the facade/charade that we are a democracy/democratic republic.
The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two parties' as long as their important issues are maintained. As a matter of fact it strengthens the false perception that there is a choice when voting.
The Deep State consists of the very wealthy who are greedy for more wealth and power. There are 607 billionaires in the US. There is no reason for the Deep State members to formally collude they all know what needs to be done and how to do it. They use a relatively small amount of their money to place their minions in positions of power heads of the movie industry, the media, the federal government, academia. From then on if the lessers in these groups want to keep their jobs/lives they will toe the line. It becomes self sustaining from tax money and the Deep State glories in more wealth and power. Here is an excellent example of the Deep State in action: The SCOTUS has passed down egregious decisions that abridge the First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of a representative democracy. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing stupid SCOTUS decisions First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech thereby giving entities of wealth and power almost total influence in elections. By gaining control of the SCOTUS the Deep State is able to further their goals.Another take on the Deep State:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/14/understanding-the-deep-states-propaganda/Is the US presently a :AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 11:17 pm GMT
1. Pathocracy
2.Plutocracy
3.Oligarchy
4.Kakistocracy
5.Cryptocracy
6.All of the above ?There is no quandary. The US democracy has long become "one dollar – one vote". Those who still believe that Dems represent working people should not take IQ test to avoid being deeply disappointed.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Cynthia , Feb 26 2020 22:23 utc | 55
karlof1 @49You are right about it being a class war. It is this class war that the neoliberal establishment does not want us to see, hence creating other divisions such as racial, gender/trans, religious, etc. so we fight one another instead of uniting and fighting them.
When the many shades of surveillance are added in to your establishment existential threat, the Matrix feels really close at hand.
My guess is that your understanding stems from years of paying attention. Do you have any recommendations for sites that have helped?
I take it that your support of Bernie, with his imperfections, is due to you seeing him as a possible shift in the neoliberal order. My concern is that his imperfections are also baggage that is keeping people from supporting him - the woke agenda, panicky human-caused climate change agenda, supporting most of the MIC agenda. The first two are areas in which debate has been/is being shut down, which is a real red flag.
Thank you for any reply, or none. I always appreciate the big picture.
karlof1 , Feb 26 2020 23:04 utc | 60
Cynthia @55--I'm a historian by training focusing on the Outlaw US Empire and everything related, which is a very wide field of inquiry. Yes, I started out paying attention as an adolescent during the 1960s with 1968 being a very important year for me. I'd read the Warren Commission Report a year earlier and thus began my real education. I passed out flyers for RFK in 1968 prior to the California Primary and watched again as the cities burned earlier that Spring. I pursued a career and tried to find love, but after 20 years I returned to college. Aside from college libraries, various alt-websites have served well over the years--Z-net, CommonDreams, The Oil Drum, MoA--along with a mixture of news sites that are nowadays all based in Russia or China. The one person I've learned more from online is Dr. Michael Hudson, whose Super Imperialism I bought and read after it was published during my senior high school year. And Noam Chomsky, not so much from his prose but from all the sources he consulted. Yes, I'm an end note and bibliography junkie. Solitude and time to study were also important assets. Knowing I was being lied to by Media and politicos was also helpful and thus made me seek out an objective historical narrative whereby I discovered I wasn't alone in my quest. Currently, Hudson's historical big picture is the one in which I believe the most merit lies--4,000+ years of Class War between creditors and debtors frames the West's existence, including its religions, which are its longest lasting institutions. And I highly value genuine discourse with associates.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
Anon [398] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 1:05 pm GMT
Lmao in the end, (((Bernie))) will kneel to usury. They always do.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
Cyrano , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 7:52 pm GMT
Bernie is threatening to expose the delusions of the deep state in regards to multiculturalism.Prior to Bernie, the deep state's not so deep thinkers believed that the phony socialism that they invented works on 2 levels. It portrays US as a liberal country and on the second level it scares those who have no clue about socialism even more away from wanting to have anything to do with socialism.
The party slogan of the deep state – fake socialism is better than the real one – was never true, and with Bernie threatening to bring some of the real features of socialism to US, it will bring into turmoil the "brilliantly" constructed deception by the deep state.
If US are going to get some real socialist policies, the question will emerge – do they still need the fake socialism that's destroying them and the rest of the western world.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
nickels , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 6:02 am GMT
Unfortunately Bernie's platform is incoherent. He supports identity politics, which is the creation of the Oligarchs to divide and rule the peons. So he is working for the Oligarchy. His 'diversity' is nothing more than a distraction from class and financial exploitation.nsa , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 6:33 am GMTThese phony liberals work in the null space of the rich's exploitation machine. They NEVER threaten the rich. In common parlance such people are called neoliberals. Bernie and his open border welfare state proves he is either a liar or an idiot. Of course, the whole discussion is pointless since congress has the power and they are all bought off long ago from every conceivable direction.
Good explanation of this by a smarter leftie:
"The Democrat's Quandary"?The Financial Oligarchs' Quandary would be more accurate. The Financial Oligarchs controls US media, finance, and both political parties does the Financial Oligarchs feel secure enough to install one of their own, -- major Bllomberg -- into the White Hooch to replace their useful idiot crypto-jew, Trumpstein?
Bolshy Bernie and Billions Bloomie are not electable, you say. Oh, really?
Engineer a stock market douche along with even a mild recession, and you can say hello to President Bernie and 300 lb First Lady Jane.
Hell, let some of that Ft. Detrick corona virus boomerang back into the US and watch the public go nuts with fear and anger. Bernie will be right there promising to cure the face mask shortage and provide free vaccines for everyone as part of his medicare for all plan. Bloomie would be even easier to install as he was a R most his life, just as Trumpstein was a D, and has actual experience running a large organization.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
pogohere , says: Show Comment February 25, 2020 at 9:28 pm GMT
@Mr. Hack Cutting the MIC sector down to size in order to provide the wherewithal to fund weapons that work in order to defend the 50 states instead of rule-the-world is both the acid test and the third rail for a genuine populist. That policy, combined with allowing major financial predators to dissolve upon the failure of their business model, would fund what it takes to bring the US in line with life expectancy and health outcomes similar to what is being achieved in other developed countries.It's barely thinkable. We are unlikely to hear it from any mainstream candidate. The US decline will continue until morale improves.
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Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com
Levtraro , says: Show Comment February 25, 2020 at 6:52 pm GMT
I suspect his open-borders advocacy and Russia-bashing too are lies; these are lines of defence against internal forces. It makes sense for him to take those positions while he seeks the nomination. If he gets it, he can betray those positions. A serious politician has to demonstrate a large capacity for betrayal. At the end of the day, he is a hardened politician like the rest.
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Feb 25, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Our source for this thought is Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report . Ford is one of the more vitriolic defenders of radical change in America, but in this analysis I don't think he's wrong, at least in making the case that Bloomberg is giving himself that option. But do decide for yourself.
Here's his case:
Bloomberg Wants to Swallow the Democrats and Spit Out the Sandernistas
If, somehow, Bernie Sanders is allowed to win the nomination, Michael Bloomberg and other plutocrats will have created a Democratic Party machinery purpose-built to defy Sanders -- as nominee, and even as president.
The details of his argument are here (emphasis added):
Bloomberg has already laid the groundwork to directly seize the party machinery, the old fashioned way: by buying it and stacking it with his own, paid operatives, with a war-against-the-left budget far bigger than the existing Democratic operation. Bloomberg's participation in Wednesday's debate, against all the rules, is proof-of-purchase.
In addition to the nearly million dollar down payment to the party in November that sealed the deal for the debate rules change, Bloomberg has already pledged to pay the full salaries of 500 political staffers for the Democratic National Committee all the way through the November election, no matter who wins the nomination. Essentially, Bloomberg will be running the election for the corporate wing of the party, even if Sanders is the nominee .
In an interview with PBS's Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday night, senior Bloomberg advisor Timothy O'Brien made it clear that the DNC is in no condition to refuse being devoured by Bloomberg, even if they wanted to. O'brien predicted the Republicans will spend at least $900 million on the election, while the DNC has only about $8 million on hand. Even the oligarch's underlings are telegraphing the takeover game plan .
Bloomberg is not so much running for president as making sure that the Democrats don't go "rogue" anti-corporate to accommodate the Sandernistas. He is ensuring that the Democratic Party will be an even more hostile environment for anti-austerity politics than in the past – not in spite of the phenomenal success of the Sanders project, but because of it.
Ford has not much love for Bernie Sanders, as he finds Sanders (and his supporters) weak for sticking with the Democrats. Ford thinks Sanders should go "third party" in his opposition to the corrupt duopoly that owns our politics. That's a point on which we can disagree without disagreeing that the duopoly is indeed corrupt, or that Bloomberg is setting himself up for post-electoral mischief.
Ford also thinks the Party will split in the face of this anti-Sanders resistance, especially if the counter-resistance continues after a President Sanders is inaugurated.
We'll see about all that. Ford may be right in his estimate of Bloomberg's intentions. He may also be right in Bloomberg's ability to carry through if his intentions are indeed as Machiavellian as he says.
On the other hand, Sanders may gather to himself enough control of the DNC and other Party machinery that he does indeed transform it, and with it, slowly, the Party itself. That's certainly been his game plan, and if he does indeed have a movement behind him -- a really big one -- I wouldn't bet against him being right. I myself don't see a way for a third party to succeed in the U.S. unless it's a "virtual third party" -- but more on that at another time.
The Larger Point
So this is our smaller point, that Mike Bloomberg may be positioning himself to "own" the DNC, and with it enough of the Democratic Party, so that he can himself rein in a President Sanders. Is that his goal? It certainly seems possible. "Mini-Mike" is certainly Machiavellian.
Which leads to the larger point: How much rebellion, within the DNC and elsewhere, with or without Bloomberg's interference, will someone like President Sanders encounter and how long will it last? If it lasts throughout his presidency, that's a horse of a different color -- a much darker one.
In fact, the dark horse of today's American politics is the entrenched, corrupt (and frankly, pathological) über-rich and their death grip on all of our governing institutions, including the press. Will that death grip tighten as the Sanders movement grows? And will they continue to squeeze the throats of the working class, even as the victims find their own throats and tighten in response?
Would you bet, in other words, that the rich who rule us wouldn't kill the country that feeds their wealth -- wouldn't spark such a confused and violent rebellion that even they would be forced at last to flee -- won't do all all this out of animus, pique and world-historical hubris?
That bet is even money all the way. They just might try it, just might be willing to strangle the body itself, the political body, just to see how far it they can get by doing it.
Whom the gods would destroy
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Feb 16, 2016 | www.youtube.com
In her fourth book Mayer draws on court records, extensive interviews, and many private archives to examine the growing political influence of extreme libertarians among the one percent, such as the Koch brothers, tracing their ideas about taxation and government regulation and their savvy use of lobbyists to further an agenda that advances their own interests at the expense of meaningful economic, environmental, and labor reform. Mayer is in conversation with James Bennet, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
It's Time for Fiscal Policy for Public Purpose , 1 year agoPeople elected a billionaire that is appointing other billionaires to fix the system that made them billionaires .... thats a special kind of stupid !!!
Neoliberalism opened the public sector up to the predatory capitalists. Financial markets love sick and violent people to increase healthcare profits and keep the slave wage prison factories pumping. This is why Thatcher had to say "there's no such thing as society" so she could embark on this fascist agenda to decimate the middle class. Fast forward 40 years, we now have tent villages, medical bankruptcies, opioid suicides, increased school shootings, mass incarceration, media consolidated Pentagon mouthpieces, educational corrosion and "market ideology" professors, fracking, poisoned aquifers, a defunct voting system, career politicians who no longer write legislation, a bloated administrative unelected bureaucracy of agencies addicted to the MIC budget. The Kochs choked democracy, nearly drowned government in the bathtub, as was their wish.
HOBO RAIDERS , 1 year agoi've often wondered how certain memes seem to pop up out of thin air and take on a life of their own, ever notice when a democrat is in the white house the biggest concern is the debt and federal budget? republicans use this non-stop rhetoric to stop any social programs, even gut them. this stuff goes back a while like the "liberal media", this election cycle i was repeatedly confronted with "taxes are theft" when defending social programs, and during the health care debate there was this "ayn rand" renaissance of "greed is good" taking hold. mayer is dead on with the corporate elites buying our government, it's nothing less than a coup of our democracy, and they are shredding it to pieces.
justgivemethetruth , 3 years agoWhy haven't the Kochs been arrested yet? They've been prosecuted dozens of times for violating government regulations and pollution requirements. It does explain their economic libertarianism though, the sociopathic businessmen like the Koch's want to get away with unreasonable pollution and paying workers 3 dollars an hour.
Stephen Cotton , 1 year agoEarned income and capital gains should be taxed at the same MUCH MORE PROGRESSIVE RATE, and at this point in our monstrous debt we need to consider a surcharge on huge wealth. This situation has been brought about by the extreme right wingers like the Koch Brothers to try to bandrupt the country into shutting down the whole social spending aspect of government ... which is basically fascist and anti-democratic. Want to do the right thing. I think you create a list of human rights, and back up it but a UBI Universal Basic Income, and then get rid of the minimum wage and let people find out where they stand in the economy on their own merits. BUT, they also need free education and an infrastructure of government jobs to offer some competition and experience to people so they can if they want and show the aptitude for private for-profit work.
It's Time for Fiscal Policy for Public Purpose , 1 year agoVery interesting that you say that the Devos family is very much involved in changing the education system to a right wing system... And Trump has Betsy Devos as his education head. But I would say that public schooling has been degraded and moved to privately owned and run Charter Schools since the first Bush President - and continued under Bill Clinton, Bush II and Obama. Both Democrats and Republicans have been pushing the agenda to the right - where education is concerned. It is an illusion to believe that the Democrats would move the needle in the opposite direction. The goal is to enslave all middle and working class people with student debt. Student debt is the only debt you cannot extinguish through bankruptcy... it stays with you until death. This debt enslavement then creates a society of desperate and compliant workers. This is the goal and it is an agenda that corporations want - served by both democrats and republicans. And for most part it the agenda has been achieved. So the dark money does coalesce for certain agendas. But the Devos's have a religious agenda where education is concerned... they want to make sure Genesis is taught as science and ban the teaching of evolution and things like that.
Howard Switzer , 2 months ago (edited)1984. Truly the symbolic year that the Orwellian neoliberal war on Americans began. Why? To "lower our expectations" of the 60's decade. Democracy is fine until it's been activated. Then the hammer comes down. But other countries enjoy a high quality of life, no threats of revolt or overthrow, so why does this unnecessarily continue? It must just be greed. Exploiting the public sector for profit.
JC Hines , 10 months agoI think the key strategic 'leverage point' is the money, specifically the money system. We need to elect a Congress and President ethical enough to pass the NEED Act which would create a public for-care money system, stop banks from creating our money for profit and establish a monetary authority that would only be tasked with determining the amount of new money required each year to support public objectives determined by Congress, like healthcare, education, infrastructure and a citizen's dividend.
It's Time for Fiscal Policy for Public Purpose , 1 year agoExcellent review and information on KOCH BROS. Enjoyed. Thank you. Hope more people listen MORE about these Brothers (2) knowing how they have infiltrated into our GOVT and now own GOP Congress/PENCE (lobbied for them w/Manafort) and TRUMP. The are also friends w/Bush. Hence, Kavanaugh was put in as SCOTUS. Citizens United MUST BE REMOVED! Our democracy is in danger. Hope it's not too late. I want my country back.
Shirley Hill , 5 months ago"To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment ...would result in the demolition of society." ~ Karl Polanyi, 1944 We've had a President Koch for 40 years now. This book explains their takeover of government so that predatory capitalists could turn social services into financial markets for exploitation and profit. This destroys society but they didn't care.
wterwt werewrewr , 1 year agoFred Koch made his money building an oil industry for Stalin, then became anti-communist after returning with the money? Sounds like guilt to me. Then Fred Koch worked for Hitler's war efforts. Fred became a John Bircher and his money went to his four trust fund sons, the Koch Bros. who now stealth control U.S. politics and Republican politicians from the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Tea Party with black money support, including funding rightwing chairs and think tanks .at all the Ivy League universities.They have much, much, much too much money. it's time to tax their pants off so they understand what work. is.
wterwt werewrewr , 1 year ago- Koch brothers story is hillarious , just for example Charles Koch got Defender of Justice award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers , LOL
Bijou Smith , 1 year ago- Koch brothers story is hillarious , just for example Charles Koch got Defender of Justice award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers , LOL
Albert Morris, 1 year agoIt's fascinating the Koch Brothers do not truly believe their own philosophy, because if they did they would go all the way in and champion worker cooperatives = complete freedom, freedom from government and freedom from a dictator boss. Like all ideologues with a quasi-engineering view of human relations and a Freudian fear of communism, they are blinded by the merits of anything that sounds remotely like socialism even when it logically matches their more reasonable libertarian ideals. In other words, they are fake libertarians, they are rank abusive authoritarian oligarchs, wannabe plutocrats. Ironically the Koch Bros are closer to Stalin in their ideology than they are to Reagan.
Jane Mayer is in a class all her own as a journalist. God bless her. I hope her next project is on the corporate media itself and its shameful railroading of Julian Assange. We need all the good journalism we can get.
James Gillis, 2 years ago
"Free Market is a utopia". I'm glad you said that so I can read your book knowing your political philosophy...
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Feb 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
dltravers , Feb 22 2020 15:35 utc | 40
...He is an Epstein like operation without the sex. A guy seeded with money and helped on the path of success to spend his money on an operation like this when needed. There is no guessing where his sympathies lie as the Post 911 NY mayor.
I suspect he is an arm of the Mega Group working behind the scenes to subvert our election. They cover their tracks by blaming the Russians and the populace eats it up. Meanwhile the real manipulators laugh all the way to the bank.
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Feb 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
dltravers , Feb 22 2020 21:01 utc | 89
Why does Bloomberg and his handlers fear Sanders so much? Out of his own mouth find out why...Bernie Sanders Discusses U.S. Conflict With Iran/Iraq
When Congress cuts off the money the war is over.Senator Bernie Sanders A War With Iran Would Be An Absolute Disaster
I have to hand it to Bernie, he lays it on the line.
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Feb 22, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Capital, woke or not, has woken up. Woken up, in fact, inside the Democratic Party, once the House of Labor. And the lead Woke Capitalist, of course, is Michael Bloomberg. So will this "awokening" -- this capitalist counter-revolution -- prove to be a tragedy for labor, and the left? Or will it be a farce for Capital, and for Bloomberg? As we shall see, this sort of question has been asked before. Bloomberg had a rocky time in the Las Vegas debate last night -- some say he crapped out -- and yet Bloomberg, and his money, won't give up so easily. After all, one doesn't build a $62 billion fortune by being a quitter. So if Bloomberg spends another $10 million, or $100 million today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow -- and works a little harder at pretending to be a good Democrat -- he still has a good chance; the next debate, after all, is on February 25, and many more debates after that. So there's plenty of chance for the Bloomberg Campaign, LLC, to stage a triumph for the Comeback Plutocrat. Because, without a doubt, the surge of Bernie Sanders has provoked the plutocracy -- mostly clustered these days in the Democratic Party -- to take up arms against the democratic socialist. So now it's Michael Bloomberg, his money, his fans -- and his hired guns -- in league against the hard left. Why, it's a veritable counter-revolution from above, aimed at crushing revolution from below.
We might consider these recent headlines. The New York Times : "Bloomberg's Billions: How the Candidate Built an Empire of Influence"; CNBC : "Mike Bloomberg builds an 'army' of elite business leaders to act as surrogates for his campaign."
The ultimate counter-revolutionary headline comes in the form of a scoop from across the Atlantic: The Daily Mail banners, "Mike Bloomberg 'is considering picking Hillary Clinton as his running mate .'"
We can recall, of course, that Clinton was Sanders' great antagonist in 2016, and four years later, that antagonism still burns fiercely . So whether or not she is under any sort of vice-presidential consideration, the reminder that Bloomberg and Clinton -- two New Yorkers, representing two key groups in the Democratic Party, billionaires and millionaires -- are so linked together is a further way of showing that Bloomberg has sewn up the Democratic establishment.
In fact, according to the betting site Predictit , Bloomberg is now in second place, behind Sanders but well ahead of Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and all the rest. Indeed, Bill Maher said on his HBO show on February 14, "We have a new front-runner, Michael Bloomberg."
Meanwhile, the bigfoot media endorsements (or close enough to endorsements) are now pouring in. Sam Donaldson , of course, finally dropped the pretense. And The New York Times ' Thomas Friedman cheered, "Bloomberg has the right stuff -- a moderate progressive with a heart of gold but the toughness of a rattlesnake -- for what is going to be an incredibly big, brutal task: making Donald Trump a one-term president." For her part, The Wall Street Journal 's Peggy Noonan was merely friendly and optimistic on behalf of her friend: "Mike Bloomberg Could Pull It Off."
So yes, maybe the ninth richest man in the world really could pull it off. Bloomberg, who spent much of his career as a Republican -- and who has, at least until recently, embraced distinctly Republican views on such issues as crime , education , regressive taxes , and wealth taxes, as well as profoundly neoconservative views on the Middle East -- has a real shot at being the Democratic nominee.
And to think, it seems like only yesterday -- February 11, in fact -- that Gallup found that 76 percent of Democrats would be willing to vote for a socialist. Would they now be willing to vote for an arch-capitalist? To be sure, Bloomberg, like many billionaires these days, is plenty "woke" on social and cultural issues such as guns and gays, yet in the view of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , his wokeness is "just a billionaire trying to cover up authoritarian & racist policy."
Yet that plutocratic cover-upping might be working. That is, if the rise of Sanders and AOC shows that the old left still has punch, the Bloombergian neoliberals could yet be punching it out.
To put the matter mildly, this prospect is disturbing to many. On February 14, progressive journalist Michael Tracey tweeted : "Mike Bloomberg's candidacy is so obviously the type of thing that would be covered with condescending moralism if it occurred in another country. 'Top Bulgarian oligarch tries to buy nomination of political party! Very disturbing development for Bulgarian democracy.'"
So one wonders: where in history has a left-wing insurgency been bested by a right-leaning counter-insurgency? If such a gear-stripping switch has happened elsewhere, could it happen here?
All we know for sure is that it did happen in France, during the years 1848 to 1851. What started out as a left-wing revolution against a king ended up with the rule of a center-right leader -- who then crowned himself emperor.
That adroit -- some would say treacherous -- political figure, of course, was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, remembered as Napoleon III.
The best-known account of this historical sequence comes from Karl Marx in his 1852 pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte . "Eighteenth Brumaire," we might note, is a sly reference to an earlier French coup d'état, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, uncle of Louis. (In those days, the French revolutionaries had changed the national calendar: "Eighteenth Brumaire" was November 9, 1799.)
Fast-forwarding a half-century -- through Napoleon's Waterloo in 1815, the unsteady restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (1814-30), and the June Rebellion of 1832 that inspired Victor Hugo's Les Misérables -- we come to February 1848, when the Paris proletariat finally swept away the remnants of the ancien régime, thereby establishing the Second Republic (the First Republic having been established, of course, in 1789, until it was snuffed out by Napoleon).
During its few months in power, the new regime launched some truly radical measures, such as the establishment of Ateliers Nationaux (national workshops) to put the unemployed to work -- and imposed the taxes to pay for it.
In other words, the French nation got a taste of profound economic redistributionism -- and the wealthy, of course, didn't like it one bit. As Marx wrote, "The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat."
Thus horrified at what the left was doing with its power, the right sought to make itself even more powerful. Interestingly, one of the political vehicles of reaction was candidly named Parti de l'Ordre (Party of Order). And in June 1848, amid street-fighting violence, the right wing gained the upper hand.
Marx, displaying the tragic militance and mystical teleology that has characterized so much left-wing chronicling, added, "The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost."
Soon, the young Louis Napoleon stepped forward to be installed as a center-right president. From that high post, in December 1851, he staged a coup d'état -- his own recapitulation of his uncle's coup five decades earlier -- crowning himself as Emperor Napoleon III. Thus we might recall the most famous quote from Marx's essay: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Napoleon's actions might have been farcical, but to many they were also infuriating. Victor Hugo, having fled to Belgium, penned an essay, "Napoleon the Little," in which he jibed, "Monsieur Louis Bonaparte has succeeded. From this forth he has on his side money, the Bank, the Bourse, the stock-market, the counting-house ." Hugo added bitingly that the supporters of Napoleon III included "all those who pass so easily from one shore to the other when they have only to stride over shame."
For his part, Marx recalled that back in 1789, the bourgeoisie had been at the vanguard of the revolution; if the issue was getting rid of the aristocrats' stranglehold on the economy, the capitalists, nascent class that they were in the 18th century, were all for it. Yet by the mid-19th century, the situation had changed. The capitalists, now far more capitalized with the coming of the industrial revolution to France, were no longer fearful of the royals. Instead, they were fearful of their own workers -- and so a counter-proletarian autocrat such as Napoleon III was fine by them.
But now back to today: the class-conscious left-wing revival within the Democratic Party has stirred the fears of more than just the fat cats. For instance, bespeaking the new mode of ideological production, Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted : "War is a class conflict, too." Such far-reaching formulations, of course, might be too blunt for the sensibilities of some -- like, for instance, all those suburbanites who have been happy to vote Democrat to advance the Planned Parenthood agenda but not the class warfare agenda.
Yet those same suburbanites and other Democratic moderates might not have fully comprehended what their party would be like were the billionaires to displace the Bidens and the Buttigiegs. That is, if the gods of plutocracy climb down from Mount Olympus to wield worldly power directly, it's likely their theophany here on earth will come in a form that mere mortals won't appreciate: less of a president, perhaps, and more of an emperor.
And somewhere, Marx is having a grim chuckle, as history repeats itself yet again. But as tragedy? Or farce? That's the question for the age. about the author James P. Pinkerton is a contributor to the Fox News Channel and a regular panelist on the Fox "News Watch" show, the highest-rated media-critique show on television. He is a former columnist for Newsday, and is the editor of SeriousMedicineStrategy.org. He has written for publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Fortune, The Huffington Post , and The Jerusalem Post . He is the author of What Comes Next: The End of Big Government--and the New Paradigm Ahead (Hyperion: 1995). He worked in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and in the 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns. In 2008 he served as a senior adviser to the Mike Huckabee for President Campaign. Married to the former Elizabeth Dial, he is a graduate of Stanford University.
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Feb 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Jackrabbit , Feb 22 2020 22:51 utc | 104
Whitney Webb tweet :The fact that Michael Bloomberg's campaign wasn't declared dead on arrival after his pics with Ghislaine Maxwell and his name being in Epstein's little black book tells you a lot about the state of media and politics in the US right now.
Responses are great too. Pics of Bloomberg with Ghislane Maxwell, Trump, Bill Clinton, and Weinstein.I learned that Eptein's black book included 5 numbers for Bloomberg.
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Feb 22, 2020 | angrybearblog.com
Ed Zimmer
IMO, all the preceding are being blinded by obsolete beliefs holding over from the 1950s. First consider that the purpose of government is to ensure the welfare of its citizens – & that's not protection against just foreign threats but also against domestic threats (like for-real life, liberty & happiness).
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Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
IronForge , Feb 20 2020 23:23 utc | 68
Warren is the Reactionary, Man-hating, Pathological Liar-Victim.Don't think America is going to Vote in Someone who Defrauded Others with Claims of being Part Native American.
Maybe Bloomberg may have been Out of Line a few times. A "Horse Faced Lesbian" - what if it were an accurate description? A "Fat Drunkard" - to someone who is correctly described - is it really that offensive?
If it were said in an inappropriate context - say for job interviews - we can see the error; but reading about Warren calling an Male Actor as "Eye Candy" puts her brand of Sexist Comments in the same Boat.
What was Fauxahontas' Native American Name, anyway?
"Doesn't like Horses"?
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Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
A User , Feb 21 2020 3:04 utc | 101
Frankly some people here seem to be living in la-la-land where impossible dreams come true.How about some realpolitik as practiced by both halves of the amerikan empire party when the VP decision time comes around. Does anyone imagine Kennedy wanted Johnson as VP or Bush I, Dan Quayle or Oblamblam the crookedest man in the senate, Joe Biden?
Of course not they were told to take these hacks as a way for 'the party' to keep the hairy eyeball on 'their' Prez.
Let's just pretend for a moment that Sanders came to conference with sufficient delegates that the hope of the DNC to override Sanders with superdelegates was simply too much for the dem party to achieve without alienating a sizable chunk of potential dem voters for life (the odds of that occurring are slimmer than a 2 year old Yemeni, but let's pretend).
Even if Sanders had sufficient delegates to obviate a brokered conference, it wouldn't matter, the DNC would still insist on a 'sit down' with the Sanders crew and insist he took a particular person as his VP. Sanders could refuse, in which case he could expect zero $$$'s for his campaign from the dems and worse the DNC would tell him that the party money, in many cases donated to the DNC by naifs who 'wanted to give Bernie a hand', was going to be spent 'down ticket' assisting all the dem pols up for re-election who were committed to opposing Bernie's favourite policies such as single payer healthcare.
Bernie would be screwed as even if he beat orange moron as he wouldn't stand a shitshow in hell of getting any of these "radical pinko policies" through, which would be justified by the rightist dem senators & congress-creeps saying "Democrat voters, voted for a democratic president not a Marxist president" over and over until the idiots among the public had been sufficiently indoctrinated to believe that tosh. There is no way Gabbard will be permitted as Sanders' running-mate unless she has totally sold out already.
Maybe Sanders should open the bidding with Gabbard, after which the DNC might offer up 'Pete the cheat' to ensure Bernie is defeated, or some other less power-hungry, more malleable dem lick-spittle.
If Sanders is smart enough to play this game, he will already have worded up one or two slightly conservative DC hacks on the qt, then make out he's making a huge compromise by selecting her/him.He could conceivably get away with that as long as the DNC mobsters are blindsided - remember most of those DC lowlifes will leap at the chance of the veep's gig since it puts you in the inside running to be the prez after yer running 'mate'. And offering it quietly early on would give Sanders the right to insist on blind loyalty - which he prolly wouldn't get totally, but he would have something close to that
Trouble is I don't reckon Sanders has the smarts to pull a rort like that off - we shall see. Whatever he does do the odds are high of him being stymied every time if he does make it
Likklemore , Feb 21 2020 3:25 utc | 102
Posted by: Krollchem | Feb 21 2020 1:55 utc | 92psychedelicatessen , Feb 21 2020 4:04 utc | 103In reply to my comment on the process, you wrote
"Actually this is not technically correct
and then you quoted Article 2 Section 2 of the Constitution.You ignored the process
I wrote on the process in which jim and jane mainstreet vote [the 2nd part of the process] to select the State electors to the Electoral College: from Link (Archives.gov) provided @ 24 and fully detailed below:
November 3, 2020 -- Election Day
During the general election your vote helps determine your State's electors. When you vote for a Presidential candidate, you aren't actually voting for President. You are telling your State which candidate you want your State to vote for at the meeting of the electors. The States use these general election results (also known as the popular vote) to appoint their electors. The winning candidate's State political party selects the individuals who will be the electors.[.]
Who selects the electors?
Choosing each State's electors is a two-part process. First, the political parties in each State choose slates of potential electors sometime before the general election. Second, during the general election, the voters in each State select their State's electors by casting their ballots.
The first part of the process is controlled by the political parties in each State and varies from State to State. Generally, the parties either nominate slates of potential electors at their State party conventions or they chose them by a vote of the party's central committee. This happens in each State for each party by whatever rules the State party and (sometimes) the national party have for the process. This first part of the process results in each Presidential candidate having their own unique slate of potential electors.
Political parties often choose individuals for the slate to recognize their service and dedication to that political party. They may be State elected officials, State party leaders, or people in the State who have a personal or political affiliation with their party's Presidential candidate. (For specific information about how slates of potential electors are chosen, contact the political parties in each State.)
The second part of the process happens during the general election. When the voters in each State cast votes for the Presidential candidate of their choice they are voting to select their State's electors. The potential electors' names may or may not appear on the ballot below the name of the Presidential candidates, depending on election procedures and ballot formats in each State.
The winning Presidential candidate's slate of potential electors are appointed as the State's electors -- except in Nebraska and Maine, which have proportional distribution of the electors. In Nebraska and Maine, the State winner receives two electors and the winner of each congressional district (who may be the same as the overall winner or a different candidate) receives one elector. This system permits Nebraska and Maine to award electors to more than one candidate.[.]
(empasis added)
Rob @ 99 - I don't think evidence of this form has been archived anywhere on the Internet. I would be particularly interested in seeing how much of a favorite Clinton was in 2016. I doubt she would have been more than 2/3, and the result not as shocking an upset were Trump actually 1/1. In any event, if the favorite an hour before the books closed always won, who then would ever consider the price on an underdog as an overlay? I'm not addressing any prediction of a winner; I'm observing the changes in public opinion as expressed through those who are willing to take a money position along the way. There would be no other prominent reason for Sanders to reclaim over Bloomberg in less than a week, the Democratic candidate top spot in betting odds, than his strong showing Wednesday night.Circe , Feb 21 2020 4:33 utc | 104All of the legal gambling outlets will tend to keep fairly close in sync with changes in odds offered. Any one of them getting significantly out of sync is taking a position, attracting layoff action from one of the others. When someone makes an investment in this type of futures, it's with an eye toward spotting an overlay. That means a current line which is offering too strong a return on the investment. The books have several ways of adjusting. They can change the odds offered, lay off action with each other to balance their money position, or offer early resolution to certain ticket holders. For example, Trump opened at 5/2 and toward the end of 2018 had been bet down to 3/2. He is currently 8/13 which represents an extreme overlay if someone is holding a ticket with 3/2 odds. When this kind of situation occurs, all of the books are likely to sustain a loss. So, they will offer early resolution. A $2000 ticket on Trump at 3/2 will return $5000, however anyone holding this ticket may be offered $2750 today for early resolution. That's an immediate $750 profit for giving back their position.
Now to illustrate just how drastic changes in the futures betting can be, a few hours ago Sanders was 7/2, he's now 10/3. Bloomberg continues to slide, from 4/1 last week to 11/2 a few hours ago to now 7/1. Perhaps Bloomberg will be attractive enough to become an overlay at 10/1? I would consider that price might be worth taking a position on, if one thinks convention shenanigans will place him as the candidate. At that point (if correct) he'll drop to say 8/5 and will return a good profit from early resolution.
The changes in the betting lines appear more discernible to me, than a shift of a few percentage point amongst pollsters. Notice Pence is back on the board, so obviously some people think there's greater than a 300/1 chance Trump is deceased during this term.
Aren't you being somewhat disingenuous by selectively nitpicking a few sentences out of Bernie's speech that merely express an opinion, not a declaration of political meddling, intervention or war, while leaving out the positive 90%, like his criticism of Bolsanaro, Netanyahu and Israel's racist unjust policies and his concern for the dire situation in Gaza?Cadence calls , Feb 21 2020 5:04 utc | 105He rails against Saudi Arabia and MBS and the war on Yemen. He's critical of Sheldon Adelson's influence, the Koch brothers and Mercer and the corruption of goverment and the greed they represent. He's critical of the massive amounts of funding spent on the military. That's great, no?
He's sympathetic to the unjust imprisonment of Lula da Silva and talks about the necessity of addressing climate change and poverty and much more. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT??? There's a Ziofascist in the White House right now who just brought on board Richard Grenell for DNI, (ironically mentioned in Bernie's speech last October... prophetic? Yes.), yet another Iranophobe! So you can guess what direction we're headed in?
Out of all the good that Bernie spoke you gripe about that small paragraph and use it to distort as still too aggressive his entire foreign policy vision and pov on issues few in Congress have the spine to address?
You think I'm just going to let slide this perversion of his message?
Just see how so many comments reek with that same type of distortion parotting YOUR CUE. Do you not feel any responsibilty to the truth and to the power your word may have to influence others to misjudge Bernie Sanders unfairly through your distorted lens?
I am sickened reading the comments that emanated from your small paragraph and bet you NO ONE BOTHERED TO READ THE ENTIRE SPEECH IN THE LINK AND RELIED INSTEAD ON THAT DROP FROM POISON PEN TO FORM A TOTALLY IGNORANT, BIASED OPINION.
I'm glad you at least gave him credit for defending well his positions in the midst of multiple attacks in the debate.
If Bernie can withstand the onslaught of unfair, disproportionate establishment and media attacks (your's included) and win the Nomination, it won't be thanks to the majority of you, but you will all in some way benefit from an improvement in foreign policy under a Sanders administration. OR DO YOU ACTUALLY PREFER TO DISCUSS WAR AND ATROCITY AND CONSPIRACY MACHINATIONS HERE ALL DAY, EVERY DAY IN PERPETUITY? Maybe that's the problem, maybe with Bernie as President you'll be less involved as armchair generals and have to settle for criticizing boring diplomacy for a change!
I don't know about you, but I really welcome most of what Bernie talked about and his vision for the future on this planet much more than discussing war with Iran, famine and climate disaster.
Bernie will make it in spite of haters, never Sanders, maligners, and distorters of the truth.
Oh, and he'll DESTROY Trump in November.
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Jared suggests Bloomberg/Gabbard.Gobbledygook!
I guess you don't really know what Bloomberg's about. And you especially don't get Gabbard! She wouldn't be caught dead working for that Neocon warmonger!
SharonM and Jackrabbit
Get a room you professional koo-koo spinbots...preferrably in another Solar System where you can't damage impressionable minds. Ugh.
I feel bad for the Bernie Bros.SharonM , Feb 21 2020 5:14 utc | 106
He's gonna sell them out again.
Dude has zero pull with his "party", and is facing a steamroller in Trump.
I would be happy to have a small dinner with Circe and friends after the convention.
We can commiserate over a few wodkas and goulash.@104 CircePenelope , Feb 21 2020 5:30 utc | 107"SharonM and Jackrabbit
Get a room you professional koo-koo spinbots...preferrably in another Solar System where you can't damage impressionable minds. Ugh."I'm against war. You're obviously just another loser imperialist.
Since medical care figures so prominently in the election, might be a good idea to know why it costs so much now:Circe , Feb 21 2020 5:45 utc | 108The Oligarch Takeover of US Pharma and Healthcare by Jon Hellevig
"The Awara study shows https://www.awaragroup.com/blog/us-healthcare-system-in-crisis/ that in addition to the original sin of corporate greed, the exorbitant costs of the US healthcare system stem from layers upon layers of distortions with which the system is infested. Each part of the healthcare industry contributes to what is a giant monopoly scam: the pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, drug wholesalers, drug stores, group purchasing organizations, health insurance companies, doctors, clinics and hospitals, and even what should be impartial university research. And on top of that, there's the government as a giant enabler of monopolized corporations running roughshod over the American consumer and patient."But it is worse than that. All the monopolists (in official parlance, oligopolies) are in turn owned by the same set of investors in what is called horizontal shareholding. The same some 15-20. investors have the controlling stake in all the leading companies of the entire pharma and healthcare industry.
"That's not all. Two of the investors, BlackRock and Vanguard, are the biggest owners in almost every single one of the leading companies.
"Furthermore, BlackRock is owned by Vanguard, BlackRock's biggest owner being a mystical PNC Services, whose biggest owner in turn is Vanguard. Vanguard itself is recorded directly as BlackRock's second biggest owner. Moreover, BlackRock and Vanguard are the two biggest owners of almost all the other 15-20 biggest investors, which most are cross-owned and together own the entire US pharma and healthcare sector. Ultimately, then we might have the situation that the whole healthcare sector and Big Pharma are controlled by one giant oligarch clan (and the very real people who stand behind them), one single interest group of oligarch investors." -- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52658.htm
PS: US is now 33d in life expectancy.Yesterday some dirty dog, Bloomberg or weasel Buttigieg, brought up the fact that Bernie has 2 million, and 3 homes, one in Washington, a house in Vermont his wife inherited from her parents and a cabin by a lake! OMG! QUICK! Call the Socialist police! He's 78, has a career in politics, wrote some bestsellers and he has to live like a monk otherwise, he's a hypocrite???Blue Dotterel , Feb 21 2020 6:19 utc | 109The hypocrites are the ones criticizing him and not Warren who appeared in Forbes cause she has two expensive homes, and 12 MILLION. But, at the debate she was coy and uncommonly silent when they attacked Bernie for what is perfectly normal given his career, success as an author and his age!
But Lizabeth, she cares so much about poor mothers and babies, and shares Bernie's platform, and yet is too chicken to call herself a democratic socialist. Yeah, with 12 Mil in the bank and different investments she's got a big stake in Capitalism! And someone mentionned that during the commercial break she was getting quite friendly yacking it up with Bloomberg, AFTER she put on the Non-disclosure artifice (watch out for hidden mics, Mike!). And she's not big on democracy either, since she would rather go to a brokered convention, than give Bernie the nomination when he gets the majority of pledged delegates. Screw her!
Oh Lizzie, you showed all your true colors!
DONE, put a fork in it!▪▪▪▪▪
SharonM
Against war and for Trump? 🤣🤣🤣
Trust me, Bernie's not starting any war at his age, and he's from a bucolic state. If you think Bernie's for war and I'm an imperialist, then must be a real bad judge of character.
You fool no one. You hate Bernie for some other stupid reason.
Really, the Oligarch party composed of the Republican and Democrat branches will not make any significant changes to the status quo, even if Sanders is voted in to the presidency. Sanders' foreign policy is the Oligarch policy; Sanders domestic policy would never get past the Oligarch house without significant watering down to be totally irrelevant. Sanders only "threat" to the Oligarchs is that the presidency would give him a 4-year platform to continue to put forth his semi-socialist domestic views, seeding the brains of the ignorant masses with dangerous thoughts.Piotr Berman , Feb 21 2020 7:26 utc | 110Voting for either branch of the Oligarch party is to vote for the status quo. All that is guaranteed are a few cosmetic changes of zero significance. Vote, but vote anyone but the Oligarch Party!
A positive assessment of the chances of Sanders to win the nomination:YnO , Feb 21 2020 7:41 utc | 111"Former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign called on former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to drop out of the Democratic presidential primary race in a memo released on Thursday, warning that Bloomberg's presence in the race would propel Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to the Democratic nomination. "
Pete could be more incisive by pointing that unlike his much more financially successful colleague from the race of nomination, he has no track record on making unwanted passes on women, or jokes that cannot be revealed to the publics. More seriously, American establishment is so vast that it is internally divided into various groups or cliques that detest each other. Pete is a darling of CIA circles, Bloomberg is so rich that he nearly makes an influence group by himself., but he may be popular among Wall Street denizens who donate to Metropolitan Opera and snicker at Trump who could not tell Verdi from Barbie doll. On political positions, I wonder if there is an ounce of difference.
There is a lot of criticism in these comments about Sanders not going all out against the Democratic Party and playing too nice, but a counterpoint to consider is that we have a perfect example to contrast his behavior with: Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi was vice chair of the DNC and considered one of their "rising stars" in part because of the elites' insipid love of identity politics, and she is demonstrating the country what happens when you go nuclear against the establishment. She burned her political capital to back Bernie in 2016 and went on the attack during the debates she was able to get into. Would Sanders really get better results doing what Tulsi is doing, and if so, why would he going that course be different?Krollchem , Feb 21 2020 8:27 utc | 112Likklemore@102james , Feb 21 2020 8:29 utc | 113What you describe is what is generally done. If the State legislature chooses to ignore the vote then your argument is not valid.
Please see the US Constitution that I linked...
@95 sharon.. thanks.. that sounds reasonable.. however at present either one of the war parties is going to win.. i suppose some will think bernie i war party lite or something, but regardless if he gets the nod - which i highly doubt - the war party is still in control.. something bigger has to happen for this to change.. collapse is a popular fantasy for some.. i am not sure if or when that could happen too.. it is hard being reasonable in this atmosphere.. i am inclined to more radical thinking as the answer at this point..BM , Feb 21 2020 8:58 utc | 114"It's time to give the elites a bigger say in electing the President"Seer , Feb 21 2020 10:26 utc | 115Under Trump Bezos lost highly profitable interests, and under a second Trump term he would likely lose still more. If any of the elites' choices get the Dem nomination, Trump is certain to win. Perhaps Bezos' reasoning was to try to provoke Dem supporters to reject the elites because that is the only chance of getting back the business interests he lost.
Bezos is a nasty piece of work indeed, but to his credit, maybe he at least sees the need of a more acceptable candidate.
"They" have thrown down everything against Sanders yet he continues to rise. His support base is HUGE. Competition can't touch him. His victories will put him up so much that the DNC is rendered powerless.Paco , Feb 21 2020 10:29 utc | 116Of all the candidates, Tulsi Gabbard is far away the closest in ideology to Sanders. She entered the race with Bernie's approval, before Bernie announced. Bernie knows that Tulsi is the only one (other than Nina Turner) that would totally have his back. I actually believe that Gabbard is the best candidate that the US has had in a LONG time. If she were selected as VP she would get a lot more exposure; the more exposure the more support she gets. I don't believe that Bernie needs to pick a VP in order to garner more votes; that is, it's not as strategically necessary as other candidates have required: I repeat: Bernie's base is HUGE. Tulsi is a BIG insurance policy. VP isn't a do-nothing position: it can cast a tie-breaking vote in the senate; it can act as collaborator with POTUS. In a more correct positioning of talents it would be Gabbard as POTUS and Sanders as VP. I'd be happy to see Nina Turner as VP but am worried that the pairing with Sanders would create too stark of a picture, one open to really ugly attacks: it's hard to attack Tulsi given her military experience (I hate that this needs to be played, but it's the reality we face). AND there's the VP debates: Tulsi vs Pence would be one for the history books.
Turkey closed its airspace to russian airplanes flying to Syria and slowed down the so called Syrian Express. The straights would be closed in case of declared war but the flow can be slowed down by other means. Hard to think that war will be officially declared with all the joint projects in energy, but logistics would be a real problem for Russia if things get uglier.jared , Feb 21 2020 11:21 utc | 117
http://www.ng.ru/politics/2020-02-20/1_7800_bosphorus.html
The second question of the 20 series to Putin is about Ukraine, as usual he comes across as well informed and with ease of verve.
https://putin.tass.ru/ru/ob-ukraine/
CirceWilly2 , Feb 21 2020 11:34 utc | 118I guess you don't really know what Bloomberg's about. And you especially don't get Gabbard! She wouldn't be caught dead working for that Neocon warmonger!
Please advise - What is Bloomberg about.
In my experience he is a conservative moderate.
Do we just describe everyone we dont like as zionist?- The american writer Thomas Frank has put this way: The Democrats had every opportuniy to win the presidential election of 2016 by focussing on the people in "fly-over land", on the people who felt "left bhind" but instead they focussed on the "creative class" (laywers, the "professional class", hollywood and people from the tech sector (GOOGLE, Facebook, etc.).Willy2 , Feb 21 2020 11:38 utc | 119- It was the presidential campaign of Trump who saw the chance to win over the people from "fly-over country".
@Jared (#117):Willy2 , Feb 21 2020 11:47 utc | 120- Yes, Bloomberg is a moderate republican but he is also an establishment figure/person. So, he won't be the one that will bring about MAJOR changes that are going to hurt that same establishment. Including the "zionists" (with or without quotation marks).
- The people who are commenting on this topic should take into account one thing. Over the years the Republican party has purged the party of "moderate Republicans". As a result of that Republican party shifted more and more to the right side of the political spectrum.William Gruff , Feb 21 2020 12:18 utc | 121About Butt-gig...Willy2 , Feb 21 2020 12:43 utc | 122If you were running a giant organized crime group with cash flow in the hundreds of $billions, with tentacles deeply penetrating all of the mass media, with connections at the top of all major western multinational corporations, and you wanted to "manage" the political system of the country that finances the military that you occasionally need, how would you do that?
Run you own candidates, of course!
So it is 2015. You've already gotten one of your candidates elected twice, and you are confident that mass media cultivated "identity politics" played a big part in getting him into the White House. Because of this you are now running another "identity politics" compliant candidate, but you have some tricks up your sleeve to guarantee she wins. Most importantly you have an utter heel running against her who cannot possibly win.
So you [big mafia don] are confident that you have the 2016 and 2020 elections sewn up, but even though it is only 2015, now is the time to be thinking about 2024. You've already used up the woman and Black man identity issues, so what next? The gay man "identity politics" angle, of course! So now you need to introduce to the public a gay candidate that is under your control so the public can start to get used to him and he can become widely known by the time campaigning starts in 2023.
Remind me now when it was that Butt-gig "came out" as gay? Oh, yeah, that's right! It was 2015. He then "married" in 2018.
"But Butt-gig is so young!"
Sure. Realize that he wasn't supposed to be running until 2024, when he would be in his forties. 2016 and 2020 were supposed to be Clinton's turn in the White House, but things went all sideways for some reason. Now you have to move up the timetable.
Butt-gig is CIA.
- Bernie Sanders has promised FREE education/college and FREE Healthcare. Although I have SERIOUS doubts how he is going to pay for all that FREE stuff, the large support he enjoys shows very well how Joe Sixpack is thinking about his own economic situation.Piotr Berman , Feb 21 2020 12:50 utc | 123
- There were A LOT OF voters who voted first for Sanders in the primaries. When it became clear that Sanders wasn't going to be the Democratic candidate these voters votes for Trump in november 2016.Blue Dotterel is not satisfied: >>Sanders only "threat" to the Oligarchs is that the presidency would give him a 4-year platform to continue to put forth his semi-socialist domestic views, seeding the brains of the ignorant masses with dangerous thoughts.Clueless Joe , Feb 21 2020 13:04 utc | 124Voting for either branch of the Oligarch party is to vote for the status quo. All that is guaranteed are a few cosmetic changes of zero significance. Vote, but vote anyone but the Oligarch Party! Sanders only "threat" to the Oligarchs is that the presidency would give him a 4-year platform to continue to put forth his semi-socialist domestic views, seeding the brains of the ignorant masses with dangerous thoughts.<<
But the oligarchy and sectors close to oligarchy are already worried exactly about that. For example, certain David Brook is almost morose. A nightmare that is at least 170 years old reappeared:
>>Bernie Sanders is also telling a successful myth: The corporate and Wall Street elites are rapacious monsters who hoard the nation's wealth and oppress working families. This is not an original myth, either. It's been around since the class-conflict agitators of 1848. It is also a very compelling us vs. them worldview that resonates with a lot of people.
When you're inside the Sanders myth, you see the world through the Bernie lens.
-----
This brings memories... agitators of 1848, revolution spread around Europe, Hapsburgs quelling a revolution in Vienna only to watch Hungary, nearly half of the empire, raising in rebelion that lasted until Czar send help a year later, stimulating dense Romantic poetry that till today children in Central Europe are forced to learn. Final stanza translated into English (it has a very compelilng rhytm in the original)[the funeral of an agitator of 1848 turns into a march of specters that disturb comfortable city dwellers]
And we shall drag on the funeral procession, saddening sleeping cities
Banging upon gates with urns, whistling into the notches of hatchets
Until the walls of Jericho fall like logs
Fainting hearts shall be revived; nations shall clear their musty eyesOnward-Onward
William Gruff:SharonM , Feb 21 2020 13:14 utc | 125
So, do you basically imply that the next run, after Black, Woman and Gay, would be Latino? In which case they actually planned well ahead and AOC could be their card for 2032? Or would that be too far-fetched? (she seems to go a bit too far into leftism for that after all)@108 CirceSharonM , Feb 21 2020 13:20 utc | 126"SharonM
Against war and for Trump? 🤣🤣🤣
Trust me, Bernie's not starting any war at his age, and he's from a bucolic state. If you think Bernie's for war and I'm an imperialist, then must be a real bad judge of character. You fool no one. You hate Bernie for some other stupid reason."Here are some relevant questions with Bernie's answers:
*Question: Would you consider military force to pre-empt an Iranian or North Korean nuclear or missile test?
Sanders: Yes.*Question: Would you consider military force for a humanitarian intervention?
Sanders: Yes.
*Question: If Russia continues on its current course in Ukraine and other former Soviet states, should the United States regard it as an adversary, or even an enemy?
Sanders: Yes.
*Question: Should Russia be required to return Crimea to Ukraine before it is allowed back into the G-7?
Don't care about your dumb opinion, Circe. But I don't want anyone else here to think I'm some supporter of the U.S. regimes two war parties. Bernie is just like Trump, Obama, the Bush and Clinton families--warmongering assholes all of them.
@113 JamesVictor , Feb 21 2020 13:49 utc | 127
I agree. An actual revolution here would probably require masses of people on the verge of starvation. But perhaps there's a trigger event that we can't foresee?As long as Sanders treats Latin America with respect, I will vote for him. He just said that he backs Evo Morales in Bolivia. That is a good sign.john , Feb 21 2020 13:59 utc | 128Willy2 @ 122 says:Jackrabbit , Feb 21 2020 14:10 utc | 129Bernie Sanders has promised FREE education/college and FREE Healthcare. Although I have SERIOUS doubts how he is going to pay for all that FREE stuff,...
he's not.
and there's the rub, or the common denominator between domestic policy and foreign policy...i.e. lucre (and hellfire missiles are so much sexier , right?).
if a candidate is not clamoring loudly that the defense budget must be cut by at least 50%, he or she is being disingenuous, if not downright deceptive, about enacting any kind of national healthcare, education, or whatnot.
james @113:Circe , Feb 21 2020 14:25 utc | 130[If Bernie wins] the war party is still in control.. i am inclined to more radical thinking ... at this point.
When reasonable, level-headed people like james are "inclined to more radical thinking" then the establishment is really in trouble.Will they take heed? Nah, they'll just send out more Circe dembots.
!!
@125 SharonMclickkid , Feb 21 2020 14:40 utc | 131If you were an anti-war candidate running for President of a militarized security state that is so easily brainwashed by half a billion dollars in ads run by a war-mongering Ziofascist and one of the highest-circulated Zionist-run propaganda rags asked trap questions to test their definition of patriotism on you, you too would go through the motions and give them what they wanna hear so they would leave you the fock alone for the rest of the campaign.
Now, if you're looking to blow in 15 minutes your years in the making efforts to win the Presidency and use your power to change that security state mentality, then you would stupidly answer what you're suggesting.
You're a Trumpbot. AND I COULD GIVE A SHET WHAT YOU THINK.
Bernie wants to restore the Iran deal, and do diplomacy with Iran, and substantially reduce military spending. Bernie is as anti-war a politicisn as I've seen in my lifetime. I'll bank on his wisdom over your intellectual dishonesty ANY DAY, ANY TIME, ANY WHERE. Unlike you, a lousy judge of character, or just plain demonizing Trumpbot on a fool's mission, I am an excellent judge of character who had Ziofascist Trump pegged from day one and took two years of flak for it! Today, I've been vindicated in every way. Ziofascist Trump is the agent provocateur in the Middle East unilaterally, repeatedly resorting to multiple acts of war against the Palestinians, Syria, Iraq and Iran. If he didn't trigger war yet, it's not for lack of trying! Everyone is wisely on hold prevailing on their cool-headedness hoping Americans elect a SANE, and more humane President, and that President will be Bernie Sanders.
When Bernie shuts the door on that lunatic's orange-cake face the entire planet will breathe A COLLECTIVE SIGH.
Now go bark your fake purist bullshet at someone stupid enough to fall for it. I'm a firewall for the truth and you're barking up the wrong tree and messing with someone berning for justice.
PRESIDENT BERNIE SANDERS
Get used to it; it's happening.
@ Circe | Feb 21 2020 14:25 utc | 130clickkid , Feb 21 2020 14:43 utc | 132If Sanders actually got into the Presidency and threatened established interests, then he would be given a non-refusable invitation to vist Dallas and drive past the Texas Shoolbook Depositary.
Or even the:SharonM , Feb 21 2020 14:43 utc | 133Texas schoolbook depository
@130 CirceBlue Dotterel , Feb 21 2020 14:49 utc | 134Oh sure, Bernie is just playing 4d chess, right? We've been hearing that for years about Trump as he bombs countries, assassinates people, and overthrows governments. We'll have to relive it all hearing about Bernie's grand scheme to undermine the MIC by doing exactly what the MIC wants. You're just another fake following a warmonger.
Piotr Berman,Circe , Feb 21 2020 14:52 utc | 135"But the oligarchy and sectors close to oligarchy are already worried exactly about that. For example, certain David Brook is almost morose. A nightmare that is at least 170 years old reappeared"
Well if Sanders does manages to get the Dem. nomination, then go ahead and vote for him. Just, do not expect anything to change during his administration.
Otherwise, if someone else gets it, Sanders will be put out to pasture, and no one will hear from him again. He was pretty quiet the past three years. For Sanders, and his domestic ideas to blossom, he needs to be able to win the presidency, not just run for it. This is why the Oligarchy will probably tank him. Right now, very few people in the US are politically active. It is only the primaries after all. They are mostly ignored by the vast majority of the electorate despite CNN's propaganda polls (which read only 52% interest anyway). In fact, US elections for pres are regularly ignored by almost half the population, anyway.
If anyone else gets the dem nomination, there is no point voting for the Oligarch Party.
@117 jaredLikklemore , Feb 21 2020 14:57 utc | 136Do you realize the damage you're doing to your credibility and reputation tooting Bloomberg's horn here?
Bloomberg is a rabid Zionist who defied a flight ban making a cruel, pompous spectacle of himself flying into Tel Aviv during Israel's massive criminal assault on Gaza while vociferously supporting Israel's shelling of children, schools and hospitals.
Bloomberg is a Ziofascist Israel shill Neocon BUSH jr REPUBLICAN. Complete Presidential disqualification in one sentence.
Now run along with your leaky can of Bloomberg whitewash.
Sheesh, how pathetic!
Walter , Feb 21 2020 15:03 utc | 137
Posted by: Krollchem | Feb 21 2020 8:27 utc | 112If the State legislature chooses to ignore the vote then your argument is not valid.
Please see the US Constitution that I linked...
And you continue to ignore Process. Well, in Constitutional Law courses that very scenario is addressed. In Law, Process matters.
if the State legislature choses to ignore the vote.."[..]
if not members of the Parties elected to the Legislature, pray tell how is the Legislature comprised?You do know when (ahead of the general election) the Republicans and Democratic Parties appoint their respective representative slate of electors they take into account Party Loyalists who are pledged to vote the presidential ticket?
On pledges of the electors: 29 states have laws forbidding the electors to violate their pledges.
In recent history: December 2016, Trump had the required electoral votes and the Hillary Mob attempted a full-throated campaign to have some of the Republican electors switch their votes at the Electoral College!!
How did that work out?
There were 7 "Faithless electors" who ignored their pledges. Oeps of the 7: five defected Democratic-loser Clinton and two the Republican president- elect. [Cases are on appeal before the Supreme Court; to be heard in 2019-2020 term]
When the Electors' switchero campaign did not succeed, Russiagate was the lever to frustrate Trump's presidency. Russiagate will continue as long as the orangeman occupies the White House.
WP > "...After a senior U.S. intelligence official told lawmakers last week that Russia wants to see President Trump reelected..."Jackrabbit , Feb 21 2020 15:08 utc | 138UNZ> "...Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Vice President Biden are being told that if they do not get out of the race and clear the lane for the mayor, they will get a socialist as their nominee, and the party will deserve the fate November will bring -- a second term for Trump..."
Now then, when will the intel dudes claim Buttboi and Buyiden and Klob are commie agents? Why already Wally suspects Putin's on the secret Badenov Shoe-phone with his vast army of verraters... I mean, there must be Some Truth, right?
And if (mirabele dictu) Burner get's 'lected and avoids Dallas... if that, then how will they change the story and tell us Burner is a Putin controlled Putin versteher?
("We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." (CIA Director Casey)
Karlofi mooted Beard's "Republic"... A proud attempt by Beard, but, alas (!) it reads like a sad comic... Painful.
Perhaps one interesting point there though > Lincoln's first inaugural.
I'll leave that for K-Man to discuss, if he likes.
I'm all for disrupting the Democratic Party by voting for Sanders in the Primary.Circe , Feb 21 2020 15:23 utc | 139But anyone that thinks that Sanders will be allowed to actually win the Primary is smoking something. And anyone that thinks that Sanders isn't working with the Democratic establishment to accomplish their goals is snorting something.
Sanders is there as window-dressing and to lure young voters into the Democratic Party fold as a "Democracy Works!" ploy (a form of 'stay in school' PSA) .
The Democratic Party won't actually nominate him because Americans would vote for Bernie's anti-oligarch program in droves. Anyone with any sense knows that the oligarchs have too much money and too much power and that government services monied interests instead of the people.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
We are now in a new Cold War. And we are on the brink of ANOTHER major war in the Middle East. It's long-past time to see through the bullshit propaganda, fakery, and scheming.
!!
Copy/paste Jackrabbit who hasn't hatched an original thought in quite some time tries to project his professional troll gig on me. Dembot? Is that all you could come up with?Walter , Feb 21 2020 15:23 utc | 140As with Bernie, I might be more like, hmmm... how would I describe myself?
The Dems worst nightmare⁉️ 😜
...soon to become the Trump-era TERMINATOR.
or, better yet, Circe unleashed.
Jackrabbit | Feb 21 2020 15:08 utc | 138Copeland , Feb 21 2020 15:55 utc | 141"Smokin' ??"
"...This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it..."
Wally is a bit shocked...here's Lincoln saying the Revolution is a Right... And he wuz smokin...what?
But yes, context matters...read the entire document>
First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 1861
Fellow-Citizens of the United States: (avalon / yale / edu an' all of that)All the slander being heaped upon Bernie is not going to drain one jot of energy from the momentum of his campaign. The trolls desire above all for a tide of chaos to wash over the country. The energy in this movement is going play out on the convention floor and beyond; and the spirit of the people is not about to be diminished or crushed.William Gruff , Feb 21 2020 16:29 utc | 142It is best not to give up on the struggle, especially when the stakes have been made so clear as Bloomberg plants the flag of oligharchy in this election. Only Sanders and Warren had the decency to react with moral vigor to this outrage.
This is far from over. This is just getting interesting.
Clueless Joe @124fnord , Feb 21 2020 16:40 utc | 143Correct, as I see it that would be too far-fetched. I cannot see AOC being managed opposition, even if her behavior doesn't seem very leftish sometimes. The establishment's biggest concern with their management of the political process is to make sure that some of the things that AOC discusses remain outside the scope of acceptable political discourse. See Willy2 above with his "Free stuff!" narrative for how the establishment wants people to react... the establishment wants to prevent the public from even considering reallocating resources away from the military and corporate subsidies to so-called "Free stuff!" While AOC's ideology and support for Pelosi and such might leave some leftists unimpressed, the fact that she even discusses free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare and education as well as living wages strongly suggests that she is not part of the establishment's operation.
I honestly do not think the establishment has any plans for pandering very much to Latin American identity... there is far too much revolution in that identity. My guess is that the plans post-Butt-gig are to mix things up... say a Black lesbian or Black transsexual, for instance. Keep in mind this would be planned for 2028 (previously 2030) so whoever they have in mind would only be starting to get publicly groomed for the job now. The potential individuals may not have even had their debutante unveiling to the public yet.
@Copeland, 141William Gruff , Feb 21 2020 17:01 utc | 144
The trolls desire above all for a tide of chaos to wash over the country.Well, true, but we don't need much help. The Sanders campaign has been a gift to socialists who can piggy-back off of his demolition of decades of John Birch Society indoctrination against socialism. But as far as I'm concerned, that's the only good thing he's done. Him losing will be better for socialists - who can benefit from his supporters flocking to our organizations - rather than him winning and forcing us to take him in as "our guy" or us being tarred with any failures of his presidency.
"[Sanders] losing will be better for socialists..." --fnord @143Circe , Feb 21 2020 17:03 utc | 145Not good strategy. People are not ready to go for real revolution yet. They need to try half measures first and see those half measures fail or be attacked and defeated by the oligarchs. Sanders losing will cause many people to either drop out of the movement or switch to the far right. Sanders victory is needed just to show the masses that victory is possible. People pursue socialist revolution out of a sense of optimism and open possibilities, not desperation. Desperation leads to fascism.
Uh-Oh, Jackrabbit just got scorched by Walter's bern brilliance.Circe , Feb 21 2020 17:28 utc | 146I'm a lover of pithy truth, and here's one to describe Bernie's movement:
The real revolution is the evolution of consciousness.
Here's one to prepare for Trump's Bernie strategy:
When a narcissist can no longer control you, they will instead try to control how others see you.
(In other words, always keep in mind; they're coming at you from a position of weakness.)
In my words:
The key to triumph over evil is to take the fight into the light and INSPIRE ALLEGIANCE.
That's Bernie's strength, and that's why Bernie Sanders will become the 46th President of the United States.
While Trump boasts he's the master of 4D chess; he will be outplayed by Bernie Sanders, the 4D Master of CHESED .Bernie Sanders will defeat Donald J. Trump to become President of the United States.
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Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Likklemore , Feb 21 2020 0:02 utc | 72
@ RSH 66
[If] either are nominated - or any other of the current crop of losers - the Democrats will lose against Trump, despite Trump making all kinds of incredibly stupid statements during the campaign. Because, let's face it, Trump will do stupid stuff all during the election race - and his supporters will no doubt ignore them or praise him for them. [;]There is that Great Silent Majority made up of Independents, RINOs, DINOs, and Moderates who are embarrassed by and are tired of Trump. Also, throw in those who will refuse to participate in the rigged system. In 2020 this time it's different.
And then there is Mike Bloomberg who told the New York Times he is open to spending up to $1 billion to defeat Trump in 2020. and that he'll put the force of his operation behind the 2020 nominee whether or not it's him.
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Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
karlof1 , Feb 20 2020 18:14 utc | 15
During the debate, Sanders clubbed Bloomberg over the head for his "immoral" amount of wealth:"'Mike Bloomberg owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans,' said Sanders. 'That's wrong. That's immoral. That should not be the case when we got half a million people sleeping out on the street. When we have kids who cannot afford to go to college. When we have 45 million people dealing with student debt.'"
But the amount of disparity Sanders announced was likely overstated--reality is actually worse:
"In the Federal Reserve's latest Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) data, Bruenig noted, ' the bottom 38 percent of American households have a collective net worth of $11.4 billion, meaning that Michael Bloomberg owns nearly 6 times as much wealth as they do .'
"'The definition of wealth used in the official SCF publications includes cars as wealth,' wrote Bruenig. 'But academics that study wealth inequality, like Edward Wolff, often do not count cars as wealth because they are rapidly-depreciating consumer durables that most people can't really sell for the practical reason that they need a car to get around and live. When you exclude cars from the definition of wealth, what you find is that the bottom 48 percent of households have less combined wealth than Michael Bloomberg does. This is 60.4 million households or 158.9 million people .'
"'Regardless of which measure you use,' Bruenig concluded, 'the upshot is clear: the United States is simultaneously home to some of the wealthiest people on Earth and to a large propertyless underclass that have scarcely a penny to their names.'" [My Emphasis]
The description of Bloomberg as an Oligarch is correct. That he's also a kleptocrat is also likely true. What's certain is he didn't "work hard" to attain his loot; he's a Rentier just like Trump.
In a related development, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has proposed to change the tax codes to "Treat Wealth Like Wages" , something strongly advocated by economists like Hudson, Keen, and Wolff and would start to slowly change the disparity. George Will wrote a column about it yesterday . And although he's mistaken about that wealth being turned into productive (entrepreneurial) Capitalism as proven by Hudson, Keen, Wolff, and others, he does agree that something must be done about the problem.
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Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Piero Colombo , Feb 20 2020 17:22 utc | 7
"But his [Sanders] foreign policies are still too aggressive"Aye, too aggressive by far to make him any kind of improvement over any other Admin. Remember, Obama, the worst warmaker of the last imperial dynasties, started as a self-declared upholder of international law, a Nobel prize-winning one at that.
Now to my point: if foreign policy is imperial, all other improvement is irrelevant.
Health care, better pensions, affordable mortgage, a free hamburger every week, etc. for the population of the Empire that murders, plunders and generally threatens the health of the whole world seems like something one should avoid, not cheer for.
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Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
vk , Feb 20 2020 18:22 utc | 19I don't think we should be delving on Sanders' foreign policy too much.Obama was elected on a "hope and change" platform - mentioning removing troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, closing Guantanamo etc. and then, boom, Libya, drones, private contractors and Syria happened.
Also, we have the Deep State, which is the true dictator of American foreign policy. This is the team of "experts" and "advisers" who will "educate" whoever is newly elected to the WH. So it doesn't really matter what the candidates state about foreign policy at this point.
It really doesn't matter what Sanders says on the FP front.
Piotr Berman , Feb 20 2020 20:43 utc | 44
And Sanders' 2016 campaigning was also very curious for his amazing deference to Hillary .Bubbles , Feb 20 2020 21:30 utc | 51Posted by: Jackrabbit | Feb 20 2020 20:05 utc | 36
I will not defend Sanders from basing his foreign policy on the progressive outliers of reactionary CAP. There is a distinct danger that he would be malleable on foreign policy, but also a hope... The hope is that he collected a lot of supporters who are less deferential to DC consensus than himself.
The deference to Hillary was a good tactical choice in my humble opinion. He leads the insurgents who do not favor the current DNC and party apparatus. To win a national elections he does need cooperation across party spectrum. PUMA is a real danger against that (search PUMA 2008 election). So he can (a) challenge and shame possible repeaters of PUMA (b) give good example (c) rely on his feared supporters who are guaranteed to be suspicious and grumpy.
Bloomberg as the champion of moderate democrats reminds me the candidate for Polish presidency that Nationalists put forth in 1922. He was the top aristocrat, with vast holdings. Nationalists had hopes of attracting the larger and very moderate peasant party, but moderate as they were, they just could not vote for Aristocrat Number One. A lot of Democrats prefer Sanders over Bloomberg, even the moderate ones. If Sanders becomes top in delegate count and Bloomberg second, brokering the convention against Sanders will be hard.
I started out to say that Sanders can't compete in the American Political sham reality if he goes ball to the wall against Israel's aggression's and totally illegal behaviour which is supported by Democrats and Republican's alike because of the monetary power the Zionist fifth column in America wields with their "Benjamins"Patroklos , Feb 20 2020 22:30 utc | 59Hat tip to that tiny girl born in Somalia for calling a spade a spade. Courage should be rewarded, not attacked by those who disrespect truth and decency.
On Sanders' foreign policy: we shouldn't forget that democracies are belligerent, that the link between war and high citizen participation in decision-making was the hallmark of classical antiquity. More recently, the icing on FDR's New Deal was ww2. It doesn't surprise me that a shift to social democracy does not imply a decrease in external belligerence. In fact moderate right-wing libertarians tend on the whole to be the least fond of war, unless it's about protecting their interests. But when the interests at stake are understood by the deliberative citizen body (e.g. SPQR or ὁ δῆμος) to be those of the collective citizen body, then war is endemic. I am reminded too that one of the most left-wing institutions (in spirit at least) in the US is the Marine Corps: the polis is a warrior-guild (Max Weber)waste , Feb 21 2020 0:06 utc | 75Thanks b for watching the debate for us :)Jackrabbit , Feb 21 2020 0:27 utc | 78Even if sanders gets the nomination (a very very big if), don 't expect him to go all anti-systemic at all, more the opposite I would say. So Tulsi for VC is like a red herring, he would probably choose a "moderate" for VC.
The following article is a very interesting one, showing the type of socialist sanders is. His ideas about socialism are closer to the european socialdemocratic system after the 90s , and we all know what a trainwreck that is.
https://libcom.org/library/bernie-sanders-paradox-when-socialism-grows-old
karlof1 @62, b4real @73Whether he realizes it or not, karlof1 is exposing a version of the establishment-friendly "best of all worlds" (BOAW) political theory
BOAW was popular when Obama the deceiver was President. It fits well with his neoliberal hucksterism aka "social choice theory".
BOAW says that if something is wrong or can be improved, it will get attention and be addressed because people will get behind the change necessary to make it happen.
But the Empire and great wealth disparity has distorted democratic processes into something garish - like fun house mirrors. BOAW is now recognized as simply hopium propaganda and is hardly ever even mentioned anymore.
!!
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Bill H , 20 February 2020 at 01:31 PM
The media is cheering wildly for Warren and saying that she won the debate, but I found her to be utterly repugnant. She comes across, to me, as even more shrill, harsh, angry and unlikeable than Clinton did at her worst.
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Feb 20, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
February 19, 2020
|12:01 am
Matt PurpleThank God for former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Where would we be without him? Probably all smoking in bars, as opposed to the much healthier things we do there now, like stare at our smartphones and not talk to each other. And of course, we all know someone who was subsisting solely on canned soup until Bloomberg blessed us with his public health campaign against salt .
Now Bloomberg is running for president, and his years of behaving like a crossing guard drunk on the power of his reversible stop sign have come back to haunt him. The stupid and demeaning remarks unearthed from the Bloomberg vault in recent days include attacks on African Americans , attacks on the elderly , attacks on gun owners , attacks on civil libertarians, attacks on women , more attacks on women , and attacks on farmers . What these comments have in common is that they're elitist. And not just elitist, but purest-grade, paternalistically elitist, unchecked by the usual manners and political correctness that are supposed to govern Upper East Side prejudices. Bloomberg just says this stuff, then sets about codifying it through petty rules. He's the mirror image of Donald Trump, only whereas Trump is our most unfiltered voice of populism, Bloomberg is the smirking id of our imperious elites.
Bloomberg is best known for that aforementioned ban on smoking in bars, and since government can never just stop on square one, New York promptly followed it up with a raise in the smoking age , a ban on smoking in all parks and beaches , and a ban on flavored e-cigarettes . This crusade, Bloomberg assured us back in 2002, would be lightly felt, since 80 percent of New Yorkers didn't smoke. Still, that leaves the other 20 percent, and a stroll through Manhattan at dusk reveals their demographic: poor, largely immigrant, bartenders and servers and dishwashers, people who have tougher job descriptions than "mumbling, lace curtain-born billionaire." Bloomberg's paternalism holds that these people are too stupid to decide for themselves whether to light up. He's like Alderman Cute in Dickens' story The Chimes , pompously lecturing the lower orders about the empirical hazards of eating tripe.
Bloomberg holds many trademarks, but his most familiar one is his almost child-like regard for himself. He's impossible to picture without a Simpsons -style "MAYOR" sash slung across his chest. An ego of that size was never going to be satisfied just dictating to smokers. And so among the endless other things that Bloomberg banned as mayor, according to a list compiled by Gizmodo , were trans-fats, Big Gulps, Styrofoam food packaging, collecting grass clippings at certain times of the year, black roofs, and non-energy-efficient taxis. Naturally he lowered the speed limit in some parts of the city. Naturally, too, his administration contemplated cracking down on bars and liquor stores (having been robbed of smoke breaks, service workers must also be deprived of jobs), only to magnanimously back off that initiative .
All of this was done in the name of "public health," that gelatinous euphemism under which can fall everything from bans on private rhinoceros ownership to forced labor camps. Yet whose health was being protected exactly? That depends, as always, on the caprices of the man in charge. So while the respiratory health of bartenders was deemed a crisis, the mental health of those living near East 34th Street in Manhattan was less important. That was where Bloomberg was caught violating noise regulations by landing his private helicopter in the middle of the day. Repeatedly. Eight times in one weekend. After he'd already made a point of cracking down on noise pollution . That's all the proof you need that Bloomberg's reign was more about class snobbery than the rule of law. The rules apply only to the little people, not the embryo-potentate sniggering while he eases off the throttle.
In order to (inconsistently) enforce this labyrinth of red tape, Bloomberg effectively turned the police into a task force on petty vice, sending them to write up people for harmless offenses ( a move their union loudly protested ). In a 2004 piece for Vanity Fair , Christopher Hitchens set out on a crime spree across New York where he tried to break as many of these enforced regulations as possible. This meant not just lighting up in a bar, but sitting on a milk crate ($105 fine for a Bronx man), feeding pigeons (summons for an 86-year-old), and riding a bike without both feet on the pedals. Strangely, though considered crimes against humanity in Bloombergistan, these particular infractions had nothing to do with public health. What they did have to do with was fines, which were then used to fill city coffers, authoritarianism in the service of deficit cutting. This enabled Bloomberg to boast about his fiscal responsibility even as he presided over a hefty expansion of the city's budget.
And it's here that we approach the heart of the Bloomberg ethos, as well as a crucial distinction in our politics. Bloomberg is the opposite of a libertarian, yet he defines himself as a "fiscal conservative and social liberal." Often confused, these two terms are fundamentally different. Libertarianism is concerned with the liberty and dignity of the individual, whereas "fiscal conservative and social liberal" has less philosophical connective tissue. Under its shotgun marriage of terms, "social liberal" can mean, as Bloomberg once told a pregnant subordinate, "kill it," while "fiscal conservative" can mean reducing people to piggy banks in order to feed finances. What links them is the flowchart. Children are bad for efficiency; so are smokers, drinkers, and fast food diners. This is the ideology of the corporate boardroom. It's dehumanizing, in that it flattens people into mere budget figures and values of life expectancy.
Bloomberg's politics, then, aren't concerned with tradition or liberty or autonomy or community. What matters is that you sit up straight, put down the Big Mac, and get ready to maximize your contribution to the GDP, your own circumstances and desires be damned. The fiscal becomes the moral. Thus does Bloomberg defend Wall Street because it's "our tax base." Thus does he support new taxes on the poor precisely because it will change their behavior. Thus does he think we ought to deny urgent medical care to the elderly because it's too expensive. And we haven't even gotten to his other infringements on those with less power than he, like the African Americans who were stopped and frisked over a hundred times under his mayorship (worthy of a piece all its own) or the protesters illegally rounded up at the 2004 Republican National Convention.
Now another target has fallen into Bloomberg's sights: coal workers. Here in my home market of Washington, D.C., Bloomberg is running commercials in which he boasts about his plan to shut down every coal plant in the country. A brief snippet from the ad shows Trump at a rally wearing a miner's helmet and making a goofy face while a crowd cheers him on. The implication is clear: coal is backwards and those who embrace it are suckers and rubes.
Most progressives who rail against fossil fuels at least make some attempt to empathize with the laborers their schemes would displace (think the Obama-era attempt at a "blue-green alliance," for example). Not Bloomberg. It's that callous indifference that makes him truly unique. I'd sooner vote for a stalk of celery with googly-eyes attached (not that one would be able to tell the difference). Here's a question: can those of us who think the national debt is a genuine problem find a way to curtail it without becoming similarly cold-blooded? And another one: are the Democrats really so desperate to beat Trump that they would nominate this little mechanical pencil of a man?
GaryH • a day ago
"Bloomberg is the smirking id of our imperious elites."Don Quijote GaryH • 15 hours ago • editedNow that is a great line.
Trump is the smirking id of the deplorables.August Personage Don Quijote • 14 hours agoAnd the Republican Party...
BTW Why didn't Bernie Maddof not get pardoned?
Madoff ripped off other rich people. Clearly that is unpardonableNoNonsensingPlease August Personage • 9 hours agoLOL.HangOnSloopy Don Quijote • an hour agoI am a deplorable. I live in the middle of the country. I watch jets fly over. I believe that illegal immigrates should be deported. I own a gun. I read the bible. I salute the flag. But most importantly, I vote in every election.Paul HangOnSloopy • 10 minutes agoI, too, am deplorable. I am a math professor at a research I university, I listen to the simpering social scientists ridicule our President and it makes me furious. I know illegal immigrants should be deported. I own lots of guns. I am an atheist, I salute the flag. I am old. I am patriotic and so very proud to be an American. I loath when liberals refer to Trump supporters are uneducated, because I know that my mathematics degrees give me logical insights that their sociology/English/history/gender studies degrees will never be able to match....AND I ALWAYS vote in every election too!Greg • a day ago"Libertarianism is concerned with the liberty and dignity of the individual". More accurately, libertarianism is the philosophy of Anton Lavey and represents the enslavement and dehumanization of the individual.I Don't Matter • a day agoBetter than Trump.MPC I Don't Matter • 8 hours agoThe best angle I can see with Bloomberg is that he could never do identity politics. We would be honestly and openly ruled by our oligarchs.Osse • a day agoHe would be useless at addressing the festering problems of which identity politics are symptoms however.
" And another one: are the Democrats really so desperate to beat Trump that they would nominate this little mechanical pencil of a man?"Connecticut Farmer Osse • 16 hours ago • editedJudging from comment threads at the NYT, yes they are. Of course you Republicans picked Trump. So why shouldn't Democrats openly flush all their professed principles down the toilet? Which is what they will do if they pick Bloomberg as their standard bearer. Bloomberg is better on some issues by liberal/left standards. But all the criticisms we lefties make of Trump's crudity, arrogance, bigotry, narcissism and sense of entitlement? His lack of respect for basic human rights? Um, nevermind.
"Trump's crudity, arrogance, bigotry, narcissism and sense of entitlement?"Osse Connecticut Farmer • 8 hours agoTo one degree or another that pretty much characterizes ALL politicians--and, I might add, a great argument in favor of term limits.
Fair point, though I think Trump, Bloomberg and HRC carry it to extremes.Brasidas Connecticut Farmer • 8 hours agoGosh, you can tell yourself that but it ain't so.MPC Connecticut Farmer • 7 hours agoTerm limits don't help if all the newcomers end up feasting at the same powerful interest and lobby buffet.CrossTieWalker Osse • 15 hours agoSpengler observed that democracy generally served the interests of money.
Well, Trump's character flaws aren't able to be written into law, law that you and I must then follow. Bloomberg's various obsessions are to be written directly into the code book and you and I will be expected to live as Bloomberg wants us to live.Ge0ffrey Osse • 14 hours agoGod bless Donald Trump and God bless America!dominigan the deplorable Osse • 13 hours agoWoland dominigan the deplorable • 13 hours agoTrump's crudity, arrogance, bigotry, narcissism and sense of entitlement?Leftists always project their flaws onto others. All of those things are on display with Democrats, and not with Trump. Trump built his wealth himself and has never displayed a sense of entitlement. Oh, and basic human rights like LIFE?... as you support the party of CHILD SACRIFICE? Nice try.
Nice trolling. Trump is the son of a very wealthy real estate developer, Bloomberg the son of a bookkeeper. But don't let that keep you up at night.dominigan the deplorable Woland • 13 hours agoIdiot. Trump only received a loan, which he paid back to his father. He has never displayed an entitlement mindset. But thank you for proving my comments about the idiocy of the Left. You nailed it!Woland dominigan the deplorable • 11 hours agoA 1 million dollar loan, in let's say 1970 dollars. I don't know about you, but where I live, that's something that's out of reach for 99 % of the population today. If Trump speaks the truth about this, of course.dominigan the deplorable Woland • 11 hours agoThere's also the observation that while Bloomberg quintupled his estimated net worth to $60 billion in the past ten years, Trump's net worth seems to have dropped from $8 billion to $3 billion in the same timeframe. In a neverending bull market. That takes real business acumen.
It was also a loan, that he paid back... and not an entitlement as the original commenter falsely claimed.stephen pickard dominigan the deplorable • 10 hours agoI think that you focus on the loan too much.. He had a trust fund for 400 million dollars. However none of those details mater. Trump simply is not a self made man as that concept is understood. He just is not. If that myth were all that what is wrong with this fellow, we should be so lucky.Mediaistheenemy Woland • an hour agoTrump is a populist, he respects and admires the working class.Osse dominigan the deplorable • 8 hours ago
Bloomberg is an elitist. The working class is unfit to govern and must be ruled-for their own good. It shows in all his speeches and interactions. The media and Democrat Part leaders feel the same way, that's why they like him when most people despise him.What's funny about your response is that I was attacking liberals who have spent years attacking Trump's massive character flaws and then they turn around and support someone with essentially the same flaws.Brasidas Osse • 8 hours ago • editedIs there another NYT? You could wallpaper your bathroom with the Op Eds against Bloomberg and the Democrats who agree. That being said, I could think of worse things than Bloomberg.BCZ • a day agoI'm just glad someone called libertarianism what it is. Socially liberal and economically conservative indeed.polistra24 • a day agoWell, if nothing else Bloomberg vs Trump would be the perfect election for Hillary. Clinton puppet vs Clinton puppet. The mob wins both ways. Bloomberg wouldn't be quite as much fun because he wouldn't be usable as an Official Hate Target, so Hillary couldn't pretend to dissociate herself from her actions.Ge0ffrey polistra24 • 14 hours agoTrump is a Clinton puppet? Are you living on planet Mars?Egyptsteve Ge0ffrey • 9 hours agoClintonGe0ffrey Egyptsteve • 9 hours agoYou are cuckoo for coco puffs.CPT Egyptsteve • 6 hours agoIf only we were so lucky to have Putin running the White House.Awake and Uttering a Song polistra24 • 13 hours agoHuh?IanDakar • 21 hours agoAccording to what I've heard, Bloomberg's base is heavily high school educated whites. Which sounds a lot like Trump's base. It's like if Trump stayed a Democrat basically.
Yeah, when the alternatives are Trump, buttigieg, and this thing you'll forgive me if I would rather spend the next four years figuring out how to pay for free tuition. It's not like any of the others are going to be less expensive and free college and doctor visits beats walls that don't stop illegals, wars for no reason, and cops trying to find "unethical things" to fine me with.
If you have a better candidate than Bernie go vote for them. If you actually like one of those types go vote for that. If none are linkable just find the least hated. Vote third party if that's seriously your thing.
Just for all that which is good don't vote None.
Though I'll be honest if it's Trump vs bloom I can see myself picking the orange guy at the moment. That might change but really Bloom is looking THAT bad.Kessler IanDakar • 17 hours agoI suspect high school educated whites are more vulnerable to mass media influence. They wouldn't have time and energy to go too deep into candidates and their politics, so their opinions are more likely to be formed by political ads alone. And if it's 24 hours of Bloomberg ads, well, if you repeat the same thing long enough, even sceptics may start to believe.IanDakar Kessler • 17 hours agoThey may not be skeptical.
Right now in Georgia almost all of the info I have on who to vote for is due to me being politically active. I visit here, npr, the news section of Google, Bloomberg's (for the corporate side), and recently videos from The Hill and Some More News.
If I wasn't active like that and did something else the literal ONLY info I would have would come from Bloomberg ads that show on YouTube and TV. I wouldn't even know how many people are running or most anyoneexcept Bernie.
If you are trying to make a living with a HS diploma you don't havetime for more than that.
People mock "low information voters" as if most people are sitting on hours of free time going "I could go read TAC but picking my nose is so fun. I'll just Vote randomly".
When you don't have time for deep politics "get it done and stop Trump" is appealingConnecticut Farmer IanDakar • 15 hours agoTrump v. Bloomberg.
Archie vs. Jughead.Awake and Uttering a Song Connecticut Farmer • 10 hours agoWormwood vs. Screwtape.Ge0ffrey IanDakar • 14 hours agoWhere did you hear that?Osse IanDakar • 8 hours agoNot sure this is entirely right. If you read NYT comment threads there are a depressingly large number of Bloomberg apologists. They brush off everything in his record ( like the civil rights violations) that they would condemn as massive human rights violations if Trump were responsible. I think these are your typical upper middle class college educated liberals.
Though he might have a base among high school educated whites. I don't know. If so, some of that should evaporate if some of his snooty comments become more widely known.marisheba Osse • 5 hours agoHis base is old white people. Breakdown of polling data in a Wapo article today.Mediaistheenemy Osse • an hour agoHigh school educated whites flock to the NYT comment threads?
That seems...odd.Mediaistheenemy IanDakar • an hour agoBloomberg's base is rich white urban leftists with college or advanced degrees. Judge Judy. Media figures on CNN. Print media figures. His kind. He's insufferable to most people.
He generally wouldn't give a non college graduate the time of day.jack of hearts • 20 hours agoIt has been said you can tell the measure of a man by how he treats those that can do absolutely nothing for him.
In this regard Bloomberg is a monster..Dr. Rieux • 19 hours agoI have not forgotten Duhbyah, aka Bush 43, and one smirking President in my lifetime is enough.
No more smirkers in the White House. Just say "No!" to Little Mike.stephen pickard • 17 hours agoI read this article several times looking for what actually it is that is so terrible about Bloomberg that his personal traits are disqualifying. What about his views on climate change , Iran and the like. The health regulations in and of themselves are what I would do voluntarily. I don't smoke for example and second hand smoke has crippled a friend who was a airplane stewardess back when smoking was permitted. Solving the homeless problem has never been possible and is too complicated to ever solve. The coal industry is dying on its own and accounts for what, less than a 100 thousands jobs. We lost that many from department store closings in a year or two. In summary the rub of Bloomberg to mr. Purple seems petty. His entitlement comes with the territory. I would suspect that each of us when we are in a position to grant ourselves a privilege we are not above doing so. Think of the small town mayor whose street in front of his house is cleared first after a snow storm. I lived next to a mayor once and did not complain although the people in the block next to me did. Does anyone think that a fairly normal person can run and be elected. There is something deeply unique about a successful politician at the highest level of power in the world. Let that sink in. " the world". Yes our politicians are very weird, kooky, imperfect, narcissistic and cads most times. One does not become a world class politician without engaging in some pretty unusual, and self serving activity. These politicians just have more opportunities to do things that are near and dear to their personal quirks. But look at the whole person. He is short in a tall man's world. He is a jew in a Christian world. He is an elite businessman in a poor man's world( not literally) and so on. Shouldn't we compare him to Trump, because that could be the choice. Seriously, can Mr. Purple do so with out vomiting? Yes I would gladly vote for a stock of celery when compared to Trump. Hell I would vote for a lump of coal assiming that there was someone still around who could mine for it.Cascade Joe stephen pickard • 25 minutes agoNicely presented.JonF311 • 16 hours agoI do love me a good hatchet piece on a deserving target. Bloomberg is a male version of Leona Helmsley (look her up, Millennials). Too bad he isn't primarying Trump instead. They could vie to show who's a meaner SOB.Bo Grimes • 15 hours agoThis is a really great article, and I'm no fan of Bloomberg, but I couldn't help but think the ending about fossil fuels ran counter to the overall thesis that for Bloomberg and other "fiscal conservative/social liberals," "the fiscal becomes the moral."
If fossil fuels are the least costly, most efficient means to "maximize contribution to the GDP" why wouldn't a FC/SL support them?Ray Woodcock • 15 hours ago • editedLeading this article with nonstop snark on smoking was a mistake. Smoking is bad, generally speaking, but it's not driving voters. In the days of Trump, inveighing against ego is equally ineffectual. Criticizing public health in the age of COVID-19 -- are you serious? Speed limits in NYC? Really, who cares? Bicyclists, yes. Me personally, yes. Voters generally? No.
The reader is sorely challenged to find any meat in this article. Bloomberg's alleged violation of his own noise ordinances, if I'm reading that right, does make a point. And yet the point is dropped. Instead, we have the fact that, yes, in a city of almost nine million, you're going to be able to find the cop who tickets an old man for feeding pigeons. But it's faintly absurd to argue such trivia, when Trump's lawyer promoted a "broken windows" theory that likewise targeted minor crimes.
Generally, this article comes across as completely partisan. Having just witnessed the impeachment debacle, that seems tone-deaf. As Stephen Pickard and other commenters observe here, there was so much weighty material that could and should have been addressed. Purple's message, as managing editor, seems to be that TAC will stoop to anything, if it has a chance of smearing Bloomberg. Promoting that message was poor judgment.Mccormick47 • 14 hours ago"Libertarianism is concerned with the liberty and dignity of the individual" strikes me as hysterically funny.
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Feb 20, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Some particulars:
- Bloomberg is revealed as having said in public that all the disposable income of the poor should be taxed away so that they will not have funds with which to do mischief like buying fast food or sugary drinks.
- Bloomberg described Sanders as a Communist who cannot be elected. In this he was correct.
- Bloomberg was described by Warren as a cold-hearted and insulting man who openly scorns women, gays and minorities.
- Mayor Pete mocked Klobuchar for her inability to remember the name of the president of Mexico. She asked if he was calling her "stupid."
These six dwarves will probably persist in their quest for the brass ring all the way to the convention. In the mayhem there, the "winner" will probably have to choose one of the "losers" to be his VP running mate.
This should be fun all the way to November. pl
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Feb 19, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Michael Bloomberg - Idiot By Walrus. Michael Bloomberg really did disparage farmers and metalworkers by saying that these are just "processes" that can be taught to anyone and then stating that information technology work requires a higher order of brainpower, implying that farmers and metalworkers are inferior to information technology professionals. I heard it myself.
Michael thus displays total and fundamental ignorance of both farming and metalwork but it's worse. Michael made his fortune simply by collecting unprocessed financial information and then selling it to end users. Farmers and metalworkers go at least one step further. They actually use information technology not only to collect information like Michael, but act on it to provide value - something Michael doesn't do.
Take farmers for example; they don't just "dig a hole, put seed in and wait for corn to come up", as Michael thinks; For a start, last years corn harvest was performed by a $300,000 machine which is not only GPS enabled and automatically steered, but it logs the corn yield per individual acre. When it's time to plant the following year, the farmer processes the yield data using agricultural algorithms to determine the exact optimum fertilizer dosage for that acre and another $300,000 machine applies that fertilizer and plants the seed automatically. Then of course he monitors his crop with satellite weather and would be using an internet enabled irrigation system to apply the optimum amount of water. Naturally she would also be using financial systems to hedge or forward sell her crop.
A friend nearby owns a cattle property. He was looking to buy a hobby farm when a local made a disparaging comment to him in a bar about "city slickers". He now has 6000 acres of state of the art cattle growing property and that is so computerized that delegations come from overseas to visit.
So much for dumb farmers.....
The story of metalwork is exactly the same. We no longer have "blueprints". We use seven axis computerized machine tools, stereolithography, robotics, computer aided design and now nano-scale machine systems that make the very systems of hardware that Bloombergs programs run.
Bloomberg is an idiot. Anyone can be taught to code. Not everyone can be a farmer or a metalworker. That requires real brainpower. The Democrat party once again shows how completely out of touch it is by entertaining this candidacy.
Fred , 18 February 2020 at 09:55 PM
Walrus,Ghoti , 18 February 2020 at 10:52 PM"Michael made his fortune simply by collecting unprocessed financial information and then selling it to end users. " As pointed out in a 2014 interview with CNN he also witholds information that some, in the case of that particular interview - the Communist Chinese government, don't want aired.
Thank you, Walrus.Jack , 19 February 2020 at 12:32 AMI concur. Bloomberg's own magazine ran an article a few years ago explaining that an average tractor is more computerized than a space shuttle. Farmers have to hack their tractors to get around software intended to make maintenance difficult without relying on the sellers.
Richard Rhodes of "Making of the Atomic Bomb" fame wrote about how farmers are very talented in a broad array of skills. Your point on farmers and finance is spot on. A good farmer has a solid understanding of puts, calls, swaps, and other derivatives.
I wanted to like Bloomberg because I am beyond sick of Trump. I just can't. Can't people like him understand that their ignorance and smugness is what drives the revolt against elites?
Walrusdifferent clue , 19 February 2020 at 12:43 AMThis is a vanity play for Bloomberg. To spend $2-3 billion on this project is investing less than 5% of his wealth. It likely was the same for Trump but since he's always been a hustler he figured even if he lost he could parlay that to more celebrity and more brand value.
Unlike Trump however who did have a message that resonated with the working class, Bloomberg is similar to Hillary in that he's a smug elitist condescending towards the lower middle class. There's not an ounce of humility in him.
He's attempting to buy the nomination by buying all those DNC office holders and party establishment figures as well as the media hacks who will sing and dance for some baksheesh.
While he struts the stage showering his billions he is just a puppet for Dear Leader Xi and his totalitarian Communist Party.
If people want to know just how complicated farming can be, here is a short presentation by a farmer explaining some of what he did to grow 514 bushel-per-acre corn as a demonstration of the possible.akaPatience , 19 February 2020 at 02:21 AMIn spite of his gun control and Big Gulp stances, I used to think Bloomberg was smarter than what's been revealed recently. I'm truly shocked at the ease with which he's publicly stated such ignorant, elitist opinions.anon , 19 February 2020 at 05:21 AMWait until more of the public sees his Mary Poppins skit. Oh boy.
Strange comment from a $68 billion self made man indeed. But as per script. Called 2 way information control. By controlling the flow of information from opposing sides one can change the facts on the ground to suit oneselfjayinbmore , 19 February 2020 at 07:24 AMWalrus,sbin , 19 February 2020 at 09:00 AMAs someone with 30 years in IT, comments like Bloomberg's infuriate me. People seem to forget that without those who have skills like metalworking, all the physical infrastructure that makes IT possible disappears and IT work along with it. Programming is a worthless profession if the bridges collapse and the power goes out.
A Hillary Bloomberg ticket would would despise and find 99.9% of American population contemptible. Fortunately a majority of Americans would hold a similar opinion of those two.james , 19 February 2020 at 10:39 AM
it would be so much easier if Bloomberg was russian... but he's a capitalist.. oh well...Flavius , 19 February 2020 at 10:42 AMAs political power has shifted from so called flyover country to Washington DC, the bureaucracies, and the Federal Courts, the Democratic Party fattened itself up feeding in the government trough and forgot where it came from.The new Democrat really does deplore the working man and all his works and days.
His last remote connection with the farm was when he thought milk and meat came from the supermarket. Now staples just appear on the shelves of his refrigerator where the Salvadoran help has put them.
The new Democrat is one of the new Economy's big winners; and he considers himself justified in his winnings and his loathings because he thinks good thoughts about the help. What he pays her is not the point; and he knows a deplorable when he hears about one.
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Feb 19, 2020 | angrybearblog.com
The Intercept usefully preports Michael Bloomberg's proposals for higher education, focusing on plans to upgrade workforce skills along the lines desired by employers. Here's the selection they excerpted that covers this, worth reading carefully:
The most Bloombergian element of the plan, however, involves the former mayor's focus on pushing colleges and universities to meld their curriculum with various industries' workforce needs and envisions a close pairing of college with corporate training and internships. As the plan lays out:Corporations over the previous decades have essentially ended their efforts at workforce development, pawning that off on workers. Instead of offering higher wages to encourage an increase in the supply of labor in particular fields, companies have instead complained about a "skills gap" and pushed for the federal government to subsidize training programs and even the wages of workers. Bloomberg's plan sympathizes with those companies.
- The U.S. invests 0.1% of GDP in workforce development , less than any industrialized country except Mexico. Mike will restore workforce development investments and partner with states to upgrade facilities at community and technical colleges to prepare students for in-demand careers
- Support innovative collaborations among employers , industry associations and educational providers to develop valued credentials.
- Set a goal to enroll 1 million students in work-based degree and credential programs by 2030.
- Work with states to introduce "Apprenticeship Degrees" for in-demand careers.
- Support the creation of employer-endorsed credentials , through national and regional collaborations among industry groups, educational providers and labor groups. Incentivize states to open competitive funds for credential-granting programs that match classroom instruction with local industries' needs.
- Double funding for the Perkins and WIOA Acts to support career readiness.
- Reform the Federal Work-Study program. This includes tripling funding for "work college" programs where students work 10-15 hours weekly with support and development. Eligible institutions would be required to increase slots for career- boosting work, including private-sector jobs, and ensure more benefits go to low and moderate-income students. Employers would be required to contribute a greater share of student wages.
There's a lot here that would be useful to businesses located in the US if they want to take advantage of it: money for vocational degrees geared to business needs, improved credentialing for these degrees, and support for internships and similar on-the-job training programs. As the language of the press prelease makes clear, businesses would play a determining role in deciding what is worthy of being learned, how instruction and work experience would be carried out, what criteria would be used to ascertain skill acquisition, and how credentials would be standardized for use in an economy where workers primarily move horizontally across employers. Some of this is based on a partial reading of the German apprenticeship system, where businesses work closely with education and training institutions to promote similar types of skills.
So far so good. At the risk of being labeled a billionaire's stooge, I think all of this is worth doing. Societies need lots of abilities that aren't found in books, and lots of people are more oriented to this type of learning than the standard-model higher ed classroom. Let's do it.
But delivering an improved American workforce to business without delivering business to the American people is pure exploitation.
Consider again how Germany does it. Most of the workers who go through the apprenticeship system are unionized. (How does Mike feel about that?) Unions are nearly coequal partners in establishing, overseeing and updating the apprenticeship system, like it used to be with the skilled trades in the US when the construction sector was mostly union. Large firms in Germany are required to allot half (minus one) of their supervisory board seats to worker representatives; smaller firms get most of their funding from public and cooperative banks which set limits on how exploitative they can be. All firms have works councils with jurisdiction over issues like work organization and skill. In other words, public policy in Germany does most of what Bloomberg is talking about, but it does the other half too, ensuring that the use of skills by business is at least somewhat responsive to workers' interests. In addition, enlarging worker and public influence within the firm makes it more likely workers will be viewed as assets and not just costs, so employers will be true partners in these public-private partnerships.
And in my view, Germany doesn't go far enough. There should be a requirement that all firms that draw on publicly subsidized skill development also emplace publicly-appointed educational professionals in supervisory positions, either on the board or in top management. Businesses need to contribute to other social goals too. This is not just a matter of being regulated so they won't do egregious harm, necessary as this is, but also taking positive steps to solve pressing social problems. There should be representation of environmental, regional, social equality and other interests on boards as well, something the nonprofit sector has experimented with for decades. Like Germany we should promote public and cooperative finance and then adopt reforms to make these bodies more democratically accountable than they are over there. Finally, steps should be taken to gradually socialize ownership of corporations above some threshold size; I have sketched an approach here .
Bloomberg wants Americans to serve business interests. That would be fine if business interests also served Americans and were accountable to them.
UPDATE: David Leonhardt, who I've disputed in the past , has a column in today's NY Times endorsing Bloomberg's higher ed proposals. What I wrote before still stands.
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Feb 16, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
rom the day he entered the race, Joe Biden was the great hope of the Democratic establishment to spare them from the horrifying prospect of a 2020 race between The Donald and Bernie Sanders.
Today, that same establishment wants Joe out of the race.
Why has Biden suddenly become an albatross?
His feeble debate performances and fifth-place finish in New Hampshire all but ensure Joe will not be the nominee, and if he stays in, he will siphon off votes in Nevada and South Carolina that would go to candidates who might put together a majority and stop Sanders.
The panic of the establishment is traceable to the new political reality.
With popular-vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has largely united the left-wing of his party and displaced Biden as the front-runner and favorite for the nomination.
Meanwhile, the non-socialist wing of the party has failed to coalesce around a champion to stop Sanders and is becoming ever more splintered.
In Nevada, Sanders now has three moderate challengers.
Biden, "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg -- who ran second in New Hampshire -- and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who ran third and took votes that might have given Buttigieg a win in the Granite State.
Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are all now headed for the Nevada caucuses on Feb. 22, where Sanders is favored. And all three will be going on to South Carolina, a state into which billionaire Tom Steyer has poured millions of dollars.
Sanders, however, is not without his own problems.
Not only is he anathema to the establishment, he cannot wholly unite his party's left-wing until his senatorial soulmate Elizabeth Warren gets out. Though she ran a poor fourth in New Hampshire, Warren is also going to Nevada to offer herself as a unity candidate.
But as Biden's hour is up, so is hers. And if she is not out of the race before Super Tuesday on March 3, she risks being beaten in her own home state of Massachusetts.
Where does this leave the Democratic field?
- Two candidacies, Warren's and Biden's, are in hospice care.
- Two candidates, Buttigieg and Klobuchar, competing to be the moderate alternative to Sanders, are in danger of canceling each other out.
- Two candidates, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, are billionaires who will be battling on Super Tuesday to crush the scourge of billionaires, Bernie Sanders.
- Bloomberg, the three-term mayor of New York, upon whom the establishment has begun to look like the last best hope of stopping Sanders, has already dumped a third of a billion dollars into his campaign. His poll numbers have risen accordingly, and he is probably the strongest challenger to Sanders now, because, with his $60 billion fortune, he can sustain himself and his organization through the convention.
But would Sanders lose gracefully to a plutocrat who deployed his billions to deny him a nomination Sanders has sought for half a decade?
Would Bernie Bros, who believe they were cheated out of the nomination in 2016, accept defeat and support a billionaire they believe robbed them of a prize they thought they had won fairly?
Bloomberg is now facing more serious matters as a candidate in a party of minorities. Here is an excerpt from an audiotape of Mayor Mike at a 2015 conference in Aspen, Colorado, addressing the crime-fighting tactic of stop and frisk that he used for years as mayor.
"Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25," said Bloomberg.
"One of the unintended consequences is people say, 'Oh, my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.' Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Why do we do it? Because that is where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them."
Midweek, it was learned that Bloomberg, during the economic crisis in 2008, said that getting rid of "redlining" -- a policy by which bankers routinely deny mortgages to low-income largely minority neighborhoods circled in red as risky -- was to blame for the collapse.
In remarks at Georgetown University in 2008, Bloomberg said:
"It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. Redlining was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, 'People in these neighborhoods are poor, they're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don't go into those areas.'"
In presidential elections, Democratic candidates win 90-95% of the black vote. After revelations of his candid discussions of the merits of redlining and the benefits of stop and frisk, Bloomberg may have a tough time climbing that hill.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever .
Not to mention Bloomberg's speech to the Team R national convention praising Dubya for starting the War on Iraq.IanDakar Sid Finster • 2 days agoOr Mayor Bloomberg's role in removing Occupy Wall Street. Wouldn't want to spook the plutocrats.
Thing is, Bloomberg isn't campaigning to the Left. He's trying to replace Biden. Biden's voters aren't lovers of OWS and aren't that concerned about the War (or else are just hawkish). As such both of those mentions are positives in Bloomberg's camp.PAX • 2 days agoThe minority vote, though, WILL be an issue. Biden does well with minorities that loved Obama and wanted Obama 3rd term. Amy and Buttigieg do not which should ruin them pretty soon.
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You, as ever, raise good points. The average American wants to know for example why we are funding religious settlements in Palestine and at the same time turning off potable water to impoverished citizens in Detroit. How would Mikey and the other motley crew approach that situation? Donald would probably say "Let them drink coke." What has happened to our core values when such clowns arise to national prominence?el presidente del nada • a day agoThe basic problem with Trump is "New York" and "billionaire". Everybody knows it, and everybody knows you don't fix it by electing another New York billionaire. I don't know what people like Trump and Bloomberg really are, but they aren't Americans, and we need to get them out of our government.fuow • a day ago • editedAn essential element is missing in this otherwise well done article: We on the Left are* united in wanting Trump out of office.REM • a day ago
Every single Democrat I volunteer with is determined to support whomever we give the nomination.
This is something Republicans with their Soviet level support of their leaders see as normal. For us, to set one overriding goal is unheard of.
Even Wisconsin is no longer a certain Republican win.
*Yes, some Berniebros., blah, blah,blah.IMO, people will not vote to elect billionaires that essentially buy their own way into public office.Dodo • 4 hours ago
If the Dems put forth a candidate that was moderate on abortion - one that explicitly condemned abortion up to the moment of birth - they would probably win the election. Abortion is a much bigger problem for Dems than they will admit. The general public do not support the infanticide policy of the current major candidates.Bloomberg was a Republican thus he has bi-partisan establishment's support.
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Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Mike Bloomberg is the world's ninth richest person. An oligarch known for strong racism and insulting sexism who once was the Republican mayor of New York City. He since decided that he wants to become president.
As he saw no chance to run for a Republican party that is happy with Trump he filed to run as a Democratic candidate. Bloomberg has since bought the Democratic Party in every state as well as the DNC :
The DNC told Mike Gravel they wouldn't change the debate rules for any candidate. "That's our #1 rule - we can't change the rules for anybody."A few months later, they changed the debate rules to let oligarch Bloomberg into the debates... after he gave the DNC $300K.
His political tactic is very simple . He does not talk about issues, as people would not like what he has to say, but simply spends tons of money :
He's dropping huge sums of money: on staff and resources , on TV advertisements , and on Facebook ads , where Trump has long dominated. And he's attempting to overcome his stodgy public image with the help of a meme army and through well-catered campaign events seemingly designed to convince voters that life under a wealthy technocrat might not be so bad. "I think it's classy," one supporter told the Times at a Philadelphia campaign rally complete drink station and a selection of cheesesteaks, hoagies, and brie-and-fig appetizers. "I feel like it's a nightclub in here. This is what he needs to get people going."To this date Bloomberg has spent more than $350 million for his campaign. He is willing and can afford to put several billions into it. Over the years Bloomberg has given more than $10 billion to build a political and philanthropical empire. He used that money to suppress voices critical of him:
In 2015, Center for American Progress researchers wrote a report on U.S. Islamophobia, w/a 4300-word chapter on the Bloomberg-era NYPD.When the report was published, the chapter was gone.
By then, Bloomberg had given CAP ~$1.5mm. That number has grown.
The really bad thing is that it works :
3 months ago, polls found Mike Bloomberg "widely disliked" with the highest negatives in the race. Now he's a top 3 contender for the Democratic nomination. One of the richest humans ever is trying to upend every part of the process. And this is just the stuff we know about.The Democratic Party and lots of its bought off functionaries seem to be happy with this. They do not mind that it makes the U.S. look worse than the Ukraine. Yes, U.S. politics are always corrupt. But outright buying one's way into office is exceeding the usual stench.
But would Bloomberg, with Hillary Clinton as running mate , really be able to bring out the votes that are needed to beat Trump? I for one doubt it.
Atrios is appalled by the whole scheme but still falls for it:
Bloomberg is bad for lots of reasons, and one of them is PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE SO WILLING TO EMBRACE A BILLIONAIRE WHO IS BUYING (not just ads, but people) THE ELECTION WITH HIS ABSURD FORTUNE. I mean, ok, sure, if it's BLOOMBERG OR TRUMP I'll choose Bloomberg, but why are people establishing this as the choice? It's absurd. The only person who can beat an asshole (fake, I know) billionaire is another asshole billionaire? Broken brains everywhere."[I]f it's BLOOMBERG OR TRUMP I'll choose Bloomberg" is, in my view, exactly the wrong response to this hijacking of a party and election. It is this behavior that makes Bloomberg's move possible in the first place.
Any good response to billionaires hijacking elections must demonstrate that campaigns by rich people have a high risk to fail. To vote for a third party or to abstain is the only responsible reaction to it.
Posted by b on February 15, 2020 at 18:28 UTC | Permalink
Nathan Mulcahy , Feb 15 2020 18:43 utc | 3Watch out for Killary the Witch.Copeland , Feb 15 2020 18:44 utc | 4
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bloomberg-considers-hillary-running-mateBloomberg's racism and "stop and frisk" harassment of a whole generation of kids, when he was New York mayor, will surely come back to bite him in the upcoming debate. So many ghosts of our haunted past. I can't believe he could become the complete figurehead of the 1%. I don't think he can make the cut, and land in the White House.stephen laudig , Feb 15 2020 18:48 utc | 5Bloomberg could be characterized, whether fairly or unfairly, as just another billionaire from New York in the process of attempting to buy a public office and if he has to buy the "leadership" of a political party as a prerequisite that's okay.BiloxiMarxKelly , Feb 15 2020 18:52 utc | 6The Mike and Don show. Billionaires that share this--they are not producers of things ala Henry Ford but financialistas rentiers ala Michael Milliken. On issues that affect oligarchy wealth, it is not unreasonable to suspect no difference nada.
On other matters say environmental matters but not on working class matters, Mike will make 'nicer' noises. Mikes pronouncements on marijuana and his bigoted and discriminatory law enforcement policies suggest he is closer to Don than me. In 2016 a vulture capitalist former Democrat money captured the morally bankrupt Republican Party and bought an Emperorships err I mean "Presidency". In 2020, a vulture capitalist, former Republican is plagiarizing him to money capture the morally bankrupt Democratic Party in order to attempt to buy an Emperorship err I mean "Presidency".
Trumpberg or Blump--no real difference-- except that Mike keeps the mask on his inner class warfare wolf more firmly. Credit to Don for dropping the mask so that everyone can see how "business" really governs what was once one of humanity's better shots at a functioning large population democracy.
In more than a few ways this is Oligarch Street's err I mean "Wall Street's" final takeover of both parties.
It used to own, 1 and a half political parties, now it will have two.
A Constitutional Republic the USA isn't. Until the U.S. Constitution is restored and the Patriot Act gets the due diligence it deserves which includes George Bush Jr.'s shake down, the voting is completely a sham. The Supreme Court chose the U.S. President (GWBJr) and then there was Citizen's United via the Supremes. Corporations not People control the USA. Bother to Vote ...!??Likklemore , Feb 15 2020 19:01 utc | 9Bloomberg started out to buy the presidency, said he "I am spending my money to get rid of Trump." He will not make it to the White House by selecting Killery [otherwise known as HRC] to be his running mate. If by crook, ff;robjira , Feb 15 2020 19:02 utc | 10January 18, 2021 - 9:00 AM
Bloomberg's spokesperson. Sadly, I regret to report president-elect Mike Bloomberg, under pressure, has resigned before taking the oath of office
Question from the Press: Was it the Arkansas bug?
Matt Drudge, exposer of the blue dress, has the scoop.
Excellent report as always, b. Only one paragraph in I was immediately reminded of how Roman politicians would garner favor with "the mob;" holding public banquets and exhibiting games. It's singularly distressing/depressing to realize that in the over 5000 year history of organized societies, the very best humanity is able to produce is iron-age republicanism...with the internet and dial-a-yield nuclear weapons.IronForge , Feb 15 2020 19:08 utc | 11More and more I begin to think that, like its German nazi predescessor, the US nazi construct must be destroyed for the sake of peace and humanity; hopefully not at the same horrid cost as the former's destruction required.
Many thanks again for all you do, b; peace.
Bloomberg is the Better Billionaire. Unlike Trump, he does run a Honest Business. That being said, Butti-Jig is MIC-Intel/DEA/McKinsey+Red_Queen backed.michael s , Feb 15 2020 19:11 utc | 12Biden is Finished. Fauxahontas Warren is backed by Corporates. Sanders and Gabbard have Good Policies.
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Regarding Bloomberg+Clinton: Everyone on ZH and Drudge's Tweet discussing the Pairing are joking that if they Win 2020, Bloomberg will Die somewhen btwn the Post-Election Victory Lap and a Month after the Inauguration.Bloomberg should think twice about installing a Clinton just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. That is his heartbeat he needs to worry about.Tom_LX , Feb 15 2020 19:12 utc | 13Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Feb 15 2020 18:40 utc | 2jared , Feb 15 2020 19:12 utc | 14If people were awake they would vote in just that way. However the frequent knee-jerk excuse is "But then I will have wasted my vote on a nobody."
To send a loud message Americans should vote for anyone but a Demo or Repo candidate.
The trick is Bloomberg was actually a decent and balanced mayor. He governed effectively. He has record of acheivement. Trumps appeal such as it is lies in his volatile behavior but kind of loses it with his attachment to Nutinyahoos behind.james , Feb 15 2020 19:15 utc | 15However I feel most of what is wrong stems from our country is managed for and by oligarchs and their lackeys. But historically I believe that is how it works - chose aristocracy, oligarchy, despot-archly, mal-archy. Those are the real choices. Communism, socialism and democracy are concepts that dont exist in the wild.
''billionaires hijacking elections''... that sums it up well b.. thanks.. this one is going to fail... all that ill gotten money is going back into circulation as bribery money now.. ill gotten in both directions...Josh , Feb 15 2020 19:17 utc | 16Same move the Clinton foundation pulled (bought controlling interest in the paper company that calls itself the DNC). They also wrangled at least temporary control of the corporation which provided vote tabulation machines. Smooth fail.Jackrabbit , Feb 15 2020 19:23 utc | 20Only genuine independent Movements will actually change anything. !!Benjamin , Feb 15 2020 19:34 utc | 25As ever, liberals are incapable of thinking systemically. Whether Bloomberg would be a more competent president or not is secondary to the fact that if he succeeds in getting the nomination, much less wins the election, that will be another mile marker, a big one, on the road to the total death of US democracy.Russ , Feb 15 2020 19:35 utc | 26He'll have shown that a sufficiently rich person can simply buy their way one, bribing where needed and blanketing the media with their ads.
Even Trump didn't do that. Trump spent little or none of his own money getting elected.
I forecast earlier that Bloomberg is planning to be anointed at a brokered convention and probably will team up with Hillary. Or, failing that, perhaps the other way around.D. , Feb 15 2020 19:37 utc | 27Perhaps not coincidentally, Strategic Culture suddenly has gone all in on pushing every DNC lie in the name of Trump-Derangement, ostensibly on behalf of Buttigeg, but perhaps for an unnamed billionaire.
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I'd just like to remind the Bernie bros here that Sanders is also a Zionist whore.Pft , Feb 15 2020 19:40 utc | 30Sanders tells New York Times he would consider a preemptive strike against Iran or North KoreaIf fake democracy did not exist the elites would need to invent it (which is why they did).Mark Thomason , Feb 15 2020 19:40 utc | 31Look, enjoy the show if you will. They decide who rules you, you just have to go along. Don't sweat what you cant change. Call out the BS when you see it for as long as you are allowed to, but thats all you can do.
The herd likes to be led. Food and entertainment is all they want. Politics is sports entertainment. They get to pick a team (or fake wrestler) and cheer. They will be manipulated to pick only those preselected by the elites. Any of them will do. All are controllable and will follow their scripts.
If Hillary is on the ticket, that is all I need to know. I'd vote against it, even if against means Trump. They can't use the threat of Trump as an excuse to get away with just any abuse they like.Red Ryder , Feb 15 2020 19:50 utc | 36If Mike the midget manages to acquire the Nomination, Trump will disassemble him in the debates.Cynica , Feb 15 2020 20:03 utc | 39And there are plenty of young, technically adept supporters of Bernie Sanders who will sabotage Bloomberg's digital campaign.
There will be a blizzard war of TV ads beyond anything ever seen . Trump has a war chest of $200 million and the MAGA people will double that if he needs it.
Trump's ground game is improved by disenchanted Dems and enriched Indies who are benefitting from his deregulation and tax cuts. They are signing up for his rallies and making small contributions. Americans tend to vote their wallet and check books, and now, their 401ks, generally up 90% under Trump. These are real crossover voters for Trump.
Money can buy you anything except height and emotional attachment. Trump has both and Bloomberg has neither.
Bloomberg's polling may be improving every hundred million or two, but he is stealing with his billions from every other candidate. The thin line of victory for him will be impossible if he can't convert nearly all the other candidates voters in key states. He can only win California's electoral votes once. Trump's path to re-election is very clear, better than 2016, with indications he can expand his victory.
Bloomberg and Klobuchar might be the ticket the ex-mayor packages. He will hope a woman, that woman, will help him hold enough Dem voters.
She just announced that English should not be the official American language.
That ought to seal Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for Trump.Imagine when Pence faces her on the debate stage.
The best bet right now is to short "shorties" campaign chances.
Much noise has been made about Trump being elected due to anti-establishment sentiment. While certainly true, Trump's election is just one in a long line of seemingly anti-establishment candidates elected, after which it's more or less "business as usual". Clearly the establishment has long since caught on to the fact that "the masses" dislike it, hence why they concentrate on the appearance of being anti-establishment. Sadly, "the masses" get fooled time and time again. One can only marvel at how it keeps happening.Cynica , Feb 15 2020 20:16 utc | 42@Russ #40Just Me , Feb 15 2020 20:23 utc | 43Saying different things to different people is what happens when one focuses on winning an election rather than on effecting certain policies. While it can be an effective strategy to lie to those who disagree with your desired policies, that also runs the risk of your supporters coming to see you as dishonest. On the other hand, it may be impossible to effect your desired policies without resorting to "politics by other means". What is to be done?
Bloomberg is in it to sabotage Sanders if the DNC can't prevent his(Sanders) nomination. If that happens they will do like they did to Ned Lamont in the 2006 Connecticut US Senate race where he defeated Lieberman in the primary. The DNC and republicans together funneled money into Lieberman's third party run. They're all perfectly happy to throw the election to Trump by the same method.Virgile , Feb 15 2020 20:24 utc | 44And Bloomberg is supported by the Jewish lobby ..Bubbles , Feb 15 2020 21:08 utc | 48Posted by: robjira | Feb 15 2020 19:02 utc | 10Phryne's frock , Feb 15 2020 21:18 utc | 49"hopefully not at the same horrid cost as the former's destruction required.
Many thanks again for all you do, b; peace."
Spot on. Consideration of similarities to the previous Nazi era, those who caused it by seeking dominance in commerce and with their manipulation of investments and credit, to the current situation and once again increased use of military force and threats of mass destruction, also demand significant scrutiny by those who advocate for better outcomes.
Thanks to you for your input, I find FAR more gems in the comments at this site than my last haunt which turned into an advocate for con artists, trump in particular.
If I steal billion$ off karlof, circe, jackrabbit, and james and give 90% of it to grieved, will you call me a philanthropist - - or a THIEF?Bubbles , Feb 15 2020 21:21 utc | 50Everyone please Stop pretending and repeating that a billionaire is a philanthropist. He does not give away what is his own self-earned wealth, he can only be returning part of the megawealth he has legally or illegally stolen.
Billionaires are the RECIPIENTS of society's philanthropy, they are so obviously recipients of the mad overgenerosity of the 99% underpaid underpowered...who should be spending their time and energies campaigning for a just cap on personal fortunes and installing countermeasures to claw back their trillions in mostly-legally-stolen wealth from the overpaid overpowered 1%
where oh where is humanity's SELF RESPECT?
Posted by: Russ | Feb 15 2020 20:09 utc | 40ptb , Feb 15 2020 21:38 utc | 53Not just your average boo bird, but a trump/adelson mercenary boo bird.
ugh this is just a huge distraction meant to demoralize people. He isn't getting nominated, at best he can buy enough of the DNC to dictate the nominee in the event noone gets a majority.uncle tungsten , Feb 15 2020 21:50 utc | 56Bloomberg has exactly one thing to offer: money. His record is possibly less in line with the Dem party's stated principles than Biden, although not by much. Most of the swing states will have even less respect for him than Romney, who is the closest comparison I can think of.
The utterly shameless nature of his run is what commands attention. A commenter on nakedcapitalism likened it to Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla, which I think sums up the appeal of this story pretty well.
Phryne's frock #49Patroklos , Feb 15 2020 21:58 utc | 57Billionaires are the RECIPIENTS of society's philanthropy, they are so obviously recipients of the mad overgenerosity of the 99% underpaid underpowered...who should be spending their time and energies campaigning for a just cap on personal fortunes and installing countermeasures to claw back their trillions in mostly-legally-stolen wealth from the overpaid overpowered 1%
YES YES YES to that and thank you.The philanthropists babble and greasy hands 'contributions' represent that fake whitewashing akin to 'see I voluntarily pay my taxes'. And then they feel good that they have earned a little round of applause from the observers and maybe get a little medal for goodness. Spew. F'ing frauds and cheats.
Perhaps at the revolution philanthropists can be put to work cleaning streets, planting trees or decontaminating Fukushima reactor.
Right on b. Does that mean that the US is now officially a 'shithole country' too? Long gone are the days when a national leader was a former railway engine cleaner who lived in a little house in a country town, a man who would go on to enact a legislative program that embraced a whole community recovering from war . The West is very very broken.JC , Feb 15 2020 22:02 utc | 58My position is clear since 2016 . Who cares who wins or whether Bloomberg pick Hillary Clinton, Warren, Biden or even a queer for VP. I hate both Trump and Bloomberg. But I hate the Democratic more.Likklemore , Feb 15 2020 22:10 utc | 60I may vote or write in Tulsi Gabbard , but NO Bernie Sanders.
The Dems are in desperate need of a viable candidate.[As for] Bloomberg- is buying his way. Just wait for his negative paper trail to be aired. Oops, some group does not want Mike around. Wapo is already on it. Not pretty. Mike Bloomberg for years has battled women's allegations of profane, sexist comments
Sanders-repeating 2016. It will be grand theft and he will fall in line. And there is the question of his health.
Buttigieg- his 15 minutes in the limelight is nearly up; the Bible belt evangelicals, and the "Optics" - an insurmountable hill to climb. Well, he can add to his CV an "I also ran for president."
Biden - He is done. Turn off the oven. The Senate investigations will come to haunt his ride.
Warren - what is her heritage? Epic fail. Trump will make mince pie.
Klobuchar - did well in New Hampshire and just blew it. OMG. Klobuchar says English should not be US national language, reversing from prior vote
Demorats wasted 3 + Years trying to take down Trump. It's now a shell.
Piotr Berman , Feb 15 2020 22:22 utc | 62
The most catchy election slogan in the history of these "several states", IMHO was "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!". It was so successful that it provided two names to Simpson's song "We are the mediocre presidents". In the song, bearded Harrison, the storied victor of Tippecanoe, exclaims "I died in forty days!", while his running mate gets half a phrase "There is Tyler, there is Taylor.Bubbles , Feb 15 2020 22:23 utc | 63Anyway, if Trump knows anything it is how to hit below the belt:
TheHill.com
Trump campaign seizes on audio of Bloomberg defending 'stop and frisk'
BY MORGAN CHALFANT - 02/11/20 11:38 AM EST 1,897
President Trump's campaign is seizing on newly surfaced audio from 2015 in which former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg can be heard defending the controversial policing policy known as "stop and frisk."
Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted Tuesday that the audio shows that Bloomberg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, is a "complete racist."
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Trump run on letting police to kill as many as they deem proper without ANY second guessing, denigrating "black lives matter" etc. But Mike is campaigning now in state with non-white majorities among Democratic primary voters, so it can hurt. Bootiegeg is in single digits there in spite of lopsidedly leading among folks who sensible store wine in caverns.Bloomberg really has an epic run. Ad rates rose 20% because of his buys, Democratic candidates for any office that actually requires a campaign can't find professional stuff because Mike hires thousands of "activists with prior experience" at double of previous salary and guaranteed till November. His position papers run in hundreds of pages, hastily copied, often verbatim (isn't there a specialty of rewriting stuff in different words?). On foreign policy, he offers measured, cool approach. Steady. Proven. Hand.
But his former advisors are true spawn of hell.
Watch out for Killary the Witch.https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bloomberg-considers-hillary-running-mateRuss , Feb 15 2020 22:33 utc | 68Posted by: Nathan Mulcahy | Feb 15 2020 18:43 utc | 3
Money Changers control both parties. AIPAC buys all the scum it's benjamins can purchase.
Antisemitc Screams to follow
I was pondering how it would go if Sanders really were to wrest the nomination - would we have the spectacle of the MSM and the rest of the establishment saying in effect "None of the Above"? (Well, not really - they'd all fall into line behind Trump, however grudgingly.)Trailer Trash , Feb 15 2020 22:37 utc | 72An earlier commenter envisioned the DNC and a counterpart Republican faction going full treason against their own parties to support a Bloomberg independent run. The MSM would go into ecstasy supporting that. With how crazy things are getting in the US, it really could happen.
Let the wild rumpus begin!
I was hoping that circe might have something to say about the WSWS article referenced above. Personally, I'm not much interested in the internal workings of the Dummycrat Wurlitzer Dazzlemachine. Like the incessant use of Shakycam in TV and movies, it just gives me a headache and a queasy feeling.james , Feb 15 2020 22:39 utc | 73Sanders tells New York Times he would consider a preemptive strike against Iran or North Korea
Someone asked, "What is to be done?" Posters keep saying, "Build an independent movement." But that is hard uncertain work with no predetermined outline to follow, so that idea is not very attractive.@49 Phryne's frock.. i share your views on this concept of philanthropy from billionaires.... thanks for stating all that...Piotr Berman , Feb 15 2020 22:42 utc | 75@ uncle tungsten and circe.. read @27 link, which i again share here and get back to us on how saunders is any different where it really matters.. thanks..
I forgot one point: AIPAC may have trouble buying mercenaries as Bloomberg spends big. OTOH, they are making preparations against Sanders, as unjustified as it may be, they view him as [what is AIPACish for AntiChrist?].Fly , Feb 15 2020 23:04 utc | 79Not the usual stench. Bloomberg produces the kind of stench that's visible, like swamp gas.steven t johnson , Feb 15 2020 23:19 utc | 81Circe@59 "Now we all know how the Buttigieg-funded app developed by a wealthy Zionist apparatchik skewed the outcome in Pete the Cheat's favor, THE NIGHT OF THE IOWA ELECTION, when a sizable chunk of the precincts got conveniently jammed in the unholy, programmed pandemonium just when Buttigieg was conveniently leading by almost two points and quickly took the stage to claim victory so he could get the bounce and media accolades that come with a first-state victory. But as we then learned, TWO WHOLE DAYS LATER, yeah, it took that long to untie a knot! Bernie was actually only behind by a miniscule .1 difference, and then short of an exact tie or Sanders victory, the Party came up with a wacky excuse to stop counting and gave Buttigieg 2 extra Iowa delegates for a less than razor-thin edge."Richard Steven Hack , Feb 15 2020 23:25 utc | 82Sanders announced a win too, which demented trash like Circe should conclude Sanders is the cheat. Even worse, since the party refused to release results, Buttigieg's win in state delegates/very close second, the indignation that Buttigieg did the same damn thing as Sanders is grossly idiotic. Maybe the movie Idiocracy was a documentary? Of course the true explanation is, Circe is a student of Goebbels and knows repeating lies endlessly works. Since the despicable Circe is spewing so many lies for Sanders, though, doesn't that tell us something about what kind of candidate he truly is? Aside from his blank record of decades, attracting filth like Circe is a very bad symptom.
The comments telling us the Democrats are the Pedophile Party or that Clinton has been murdering her way to take power for the sixteen of the last twenty four years are equally reactionary psychotic drivel. The witless theories that Trump is fighting the Deep State and ending forever wars and breaking the Duopoly/draining the swamp and all such Trumpery are still stupid and reactionary. They do seem to be appropriate to a stealth AfD site.
"To vote for a third party or to abstain is the only responsible reaction to it."Piotr Berman , Feb 15 2020 23:26 utc | 83To quote Percival Rose on the Nikita tv show once *again*: "That ain't gonna happen."
Seriously, b, are you high? You really think *any* third party is capable of beating *both* the Democrats *and* the Republicans when *both* of those parties can field billionaires (or even candidates with the backing of billionaires)?
Get serious. The US is run by oligarchs and corporations and has been for decades, aided by a Deep State intelligence apparatus and a compliant and controlled media.
There is *zero* chance of *anyone* - including Jesus himself if you're dumb enough to believe in such a thing - overthrowing the power structure using voting. As we anarchists like to say, "If voting could change the system, it would be illegal."
And abstaining simply means they win. So neither voting nor abstaining can achieve anything.
The system is not just "broken", it is *destroyed.* And a lot of people would argue that it was broken from the beginning and never intended to be successful. It was a delusion and a pipe dream that the US was ever going to be a "nation of laws and not of men." Or that its citizens would keep their heads out of their butts and vote in non-corrupt, competent leaders.
Seriously, the entire concept is a joke.
Bloomberg is 5'5", do we need another Napoleon?Bubbles , Feb 15 2020 23:27 utc | 84Posted by: DeQuincey | Feb 15 2020 22:34 utc | 70
Trump on accountants: The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes
Bloomberg lacks yarmulke, something that can be easily remedied. In any case, Napoleonic legacy is not all bad, e.g. metric system, or reorganization of a jumble of legal fiefs in Germany into something workable, today the boundaries of German landes largely follow the lines made by Napoleon. granted, one metric system is enough, and an interest in reorganizing regional boundaries is the last thing I would see in the next President, but short people were often good leader. That said, the current strongman of Poland is 168 cm old, so hostile comment writers call him "evil midget", although more recently they prefer "lame" -- he had a knee replacement. In any case, he is a piece of work.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Feb 15 2020 22:37 utc | 71David G , Feb 15 2020 23:34 utc | 86Sanders Gabbard or bust.
Ms. Gabbard is a rare American gem. She speaks truth unlike the coward and lifelong conman Major Bonespurs
Bloomberg is such a "target-rich environment" of awful it's hard to know where to start, but on the basic question of his character, much more revealing than this or that crude remark, is the fact that he has always restricted how Bloomberg News can report on him.H.Schmatz , Feb 15 2020 23:50 utc | 87Now in this campaign, rather than reconsider their "tradition of not investigating Mike", Bloomberg News has extended it to cover all the Dem presidential candidates. In other words, they shouldn't be considered a real news organization at all.
Anybody in Bloomberg's position worth a tinker's dam would have told his news execs and editors from the get-go to report everything about him, and dig for more. That he'd fire anybody caught going easy on him!
What a pisher.
Advising voting for a non-existent or impossible to build on time third party, or abstaining from voting, in my view, equates asking the vote for Trump, since, if you had not noticed, the right always go to vote ( not only in the US but everywhere, hence one of their tactics is "killing hope"...), and they will vote either for Trump or for Bloomberg ( the impostor trying to hijack the Democrat vote for the Republicans and oligarchs ( he himself has stated the he and Trump know and treat the same people in NYC...)H.Schmatz , Feb 15 2020 23:56 utc | 88That Bloomberg has advanced he would choose Hillary Clinton as VP comes to make a remake of the 2016 scenario, with the people chosing the "lesser evil", who would be in this case again Trump, as a whole psyop will be unleashed to asure that this couple, Bloomberg/Clinton will start more wars than Trump ( if that would be even possible ).
The tone of the article as taking as a job done that Bloomberg will be able to buy the Democrat nomination seems to come as discouraging towards those in the Sanders´ wagon, obviating the strong popular support Sanders is getting in every state so far..
Who would had thought that B would adopt Jackrabbit´s mantra, "not to vote"...
This JR for to have been so often accused by so many regulars of being a troll, manages to survive here quite well... while so many others, much more encouraging and not limited to one topic/mantra but adding so much interesting and varied info, have been wiped out....Curious...BTW, where Sasha has gone?
Just for the record, and since we talk about the transmigration of conservative right wing oligarchs through the US bipartisan system, reading at the Unz Review an article which makes a summary/compilation of all the points made to this date on the Coronavirus issue, this site was linked and labelled as "conservative"..Piero Colombo , Feb 15 2020 23:59 utc | 89Why do you think this could be?
Circe @59Edward , Feb 16 2020 0:07 utc | 90Your Sanders is as much of a warmonger as Bush, Clinton, the Clinton harpy, Obama and the rather tentative Trump.
He voted for the AUMF 2001 that enabled the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (2003 was just for show, and he did vote the budget for the Iraq invasion.)He is a Zionist, continues to be a Zionist, only not the same party as Netanyahoo.
He is not running to win anything but the badge of true and faithful servant of the Imperial owners of his "Democratic" party, bringing him the disgruntled vote again and again, as proved in 2016 and officially promised in 2020.
All this is a matter of uncontroversial record of facts and you are part of the propaganda operation. If willingly or not is irrelevant.
Bloomberg may be able to ensure that the convention is brokered and "super delegates" will decide the nominee. As mayor he crushed the Occupy movement.CarolDW , Feb 16 2020 0:10 utc | 91Bloomberg's arrogance is his stumbling block.He doesn't seem to think any of his actions have consequences. He has no sense of how people perceive him.dltravers , Feb 16 2020 0:19 utc | 93In a time of revolutionary levels.of wealth inequality, when Americans are blaming excessive wealth for their diminished circumstances and future, Bloomberg puts himself forward instead of a Pete Buttigeig cutout like Seth Klarman.
If his financial position weren't irritant enough, he dumps a bunch of money on the DNC and gets them to change the rules so he can run, piling outrage on top of annoyance.
He does a terrible job of explaining the worst aspects of his tenure as mayor,defending his racism. His successor who won by a landslide is backing Bernie.
The cherry on this ugly cake is Hillary. even more reviled and distrusted now now than before she stole the candidacy from Bernie and lost the farm to Trump. lest we forget, blaming Russia for her loss and sniping from the sidelines. He puts her in the co-pilots seat. Atta boy Mike.The DNC are masters at misleading polls. They and CNN published 6 week old polls in order to mislead voters on how well Bernie was doing. Buttigeig polling high in NH after it became known he paid for the app that wrecked the caucus and gave him the lead?
None of this looks like a winning campaign to me.I find it interesting that Trumps two primary targets, Pocahontas and Biden are pretty much done for already. He has not even touched the others. He spent something like 66 million in 2016. Bloomberg will spend billions to get nowhere. How many people will turn out for a Bloomberg rally?vk , Feb 16 2020 0:20 utc | 94Bloomberg is out to get Sanders, not Trump. He talks Trump BS out of jealousy and so he can stay in the in crowd in NY. In reality, they are a coin with the same face on both sides.
I'm surprised people here are surprised. The USA was always governed by a capitalist oligarchy. This was specially evident after Thomas Jefferson (the last descendent of Washington) until the birth of the Republican Party (Lincoln).karlof1 , Feb 16 2020 0:37 utc | 98After FDR and the birth of a real existential threat (the USSR), the American oligarchy sobered up a little bit and begun to govern from behind the curtains, behind professional politicians (in order to not lose the ideological war in the Cold War).
All the evidence points out the USA was always like this. Bloomberg is not the anomaly, but the normal. Bernie Sanders is the anomaly, which must be eliminated from the American organism. As such, it is also an illusion to think the American system (and, indeed, the western democratic system) can ever be reformed.
Bloomberg & Clinton: Two of the most useless people I can think of on the planet. They were the sort of occupants meant for the copter Kobe was in.Bubbles , Feb 16 2020 0:43 utc | 99BUT
This goes to show just how rattled the D-Party Establishment is with Sanders and the growing Movement he's riding that has excellent momentum. And as I pointed out the other day, Trump just gave him a huge boost with his proposed budget gutting of Medicare and Social Security.
A note for those who've asked for the link to my VK Space. All you need do is click on karlof1 at the bottom of my comment and you'll be taken directly there to register or sign in depending on your status.
Bubbles prediction: Bloomberg would pummel helter skelter trump into the ground. He may well be another bastard, but unlike trump he can articulate what he want's to say. Unlike trump's word salads that surely must be encoded messages only the Maga hat faithful can decode.Playing to ignorance and telling people what they want to hear has a short shelf life, especially now what with the US federal debt out of control and King of debt trump saying who gives a shit, we have a country to run.
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Feb 15, 2020 | thehill.com
Hill.TV host Krystal Ball said Sen. Elizabeth Warren 's (D-Mass.) "campaign was lost long before this election cycle."
Ball pointed to Warren's "decision not to run in 2016 - she sat out the most critical election of our lifetime even though she knew better than I did the flaws of Hillary Clinton " Ball then slammed Warren's decision to not endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016 noting "when her supposed friend and ally Bernie Sanders, who allegedly shares her politics and was fighting for the same values she had staked her career on got into the race and started sky-rocketing in the polls challenging Hillary for the lead, rather than making the movement choice and backing the progressive, she sat it out."
Ball claims Warren's "attempts to co-opt revolutionary rhetoric in service of an establishment campaign, like Disney doing socialism, satisfied no one and left her unable to win more than 1 county and Iowa and an embarrassing distant fourth behind Klobuchar in New Hampshire."
Click on the video above to catch Ball's full remarks.
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Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Cynica , Feb 15 2020 20:03 utc | 39Much noise has been made about Trump being elected due to anti-establishment sentiment. While certainly true, Trump's election is just one in a long line of seemingly anti-establishment candidates elected, after which it's more or less "business as usual".Veritas X- , Feb 15 2020 18:58 utc | 8Clearly the establishment has long since caught on to the fact that "the masses" dislike it, hence why they concentrate on the appearance of being anti-establishment.
Sadly, "the masses" get fooled time and time again. One can only marvel at how it keeps happening.
A picture is worth a 1,000 words: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2016/01/25/opinion/RFDBloomberg/RFDBloomberg-sfSpan.jpgIt's all theater for the masses. And little Mikey is just another frontman for the redshields/epstein-barr gang:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/TpJyOTc7PeDS3-ZEI1kN5W4iobZmqut_rVn0D5UvEdUef_NkTa0AZjgyzJlDYy86gISq6Zztsc9cl9mFOAQjyCFAaJUTmqKj=s0-dX-
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Feb 15, 2020 | www.youtube.com
NOTHING BURGER - CONFIRMED. , 1 day ago (edited)
Jim , 1 day agoHEY BARR , HlLLARY USED HAMMERS & BLEACHBlT TO DESTR0Y/HlDE EVlDENCE OF UNKN0WN CRlMES!!
Bobby Hendricks , 1 day agoFairness is an important idea in America. Unfortunately it isn't to our "justice" system - never has been!
Trollhaj , 1 day agoNo such thing as fairness when we are talking about the 2 tier justice system
Douglas Tibbitts , 1 day ago (edited)"We're not going to let him just torch this democracy" Says, Eric "We Have Nukes" Swalwell
Tony Pinto , 1 day agoSay while we are at it wasn't this the guy who gave Jeffrey Epstein his cush deal.?
Sheila hucke , 1 day agoHillary was asked specifically about the movement of arms from Libya to Syria during congressional inquiry and she claimed to know nothing of such activities. Lied to congress, yet still walking around free.
Phillip Johnson , 1 day ago (edited)Swallwell is a liar just like the rest of em. He says they don't wake up in the morning wanting to Impeach him, BS they have wanted to Impeach him since before he was president....
Heather Swanson , 20 hours agoThe swamp is deeper than originally thought! Also, I am really quite surprised at the amount of RINOs in the party.
Greg Olsen , 1 day ago"We don't wake up in the morning, wanting to impeach the president" - Eric Swalwell 😳🤔 are we living in the same timeline bro?
homeward bound , 1 day agoJudge refused excupitory evidence that would have cleared Stone! :-(
I'm with Tucker. Let the pres pardon him and that's that.
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Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
D. , Feb 15 2020 19:42 utc | 32
@farm ecologist #29Surely he could. But the good sheepdog he is he wont!
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Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Antoinetta III , Feb 15 2020 21:47 utc | 55
In the past several elections, in the space for "President," I wrote in - Vladimir Putin.Antoinetta III
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Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Jackrabbit , Feb 15 2020 19:18 utc | 18
Interesting analysis b.Here's another view: Zionist Bloomberg and Zionist Biden and Zionist Buttigieg and Zionist Klubachar and Zionist Warren and Zionist Sanders competing to race against Zionist Trump. I think I know who the winners and losers are already.
But they do put on a good show, don't they?
!!
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Feb 14, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
om Friedman writes a love letter to his favorite wealthy authoritarian (no, not the Saudi one):
And this candidate is now rising steadily in the polls. This candidate is Michael Bloomberg. This candidate has Trump very worried.
Bloomberg has managed to buy some support in national polling for the low, low price of $300 million spent so far on ads, but there is still not much reason to believe that most Democratic voters would want him as their nominee. He is skipping the first few contests, so we won't know for sure just how little support he has until March, but he seems as much of a poor fit with the Democratic Party electorate as ever. His attempts to "apologize" for the stop-and-frisk policy in New York would be more meaningful if he weren't lying through his teeth about his support for it. According to Bloomberg , this was a policy that he merely inherited before getting rid of it, but the truth is that he escalated it and was forced to stop it because of a court order:
Ultimately, a federal judge found in 2013 that stop-and-frisk intentionally and systematically violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of people by wrongly targeting black and Hispanic men. Bloomberg blasted the ruling at the time, calling it a "dangerous decision made by a judge who I think does not understand how policing works and what is compliant with the U.S. Constitution."
Bloomberg's record on civil liberties in general is abysmal. Alex Pareene recounts how Bloomberg had hundreds of protesters arrested ahead of the Republican National Convention simply to keep them off the streets:
Over the course of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the New York Police Department arrested nearly 2,000 people at protests. The mass arrests were indiscriminate. Bystanders and journalists were among those hauled to a filthy bus depot terminal that served as a makeshift holding pen.
Hundreds of people were charged with minor crimes so that they could be kept in jail for the duration of the convention. A judge held the city in contempt of court for failing to abide by a state policy that gives people in jail the right see a judge or be released within 24 hours. And the city lied about how long it took to process the fingerprints of its detainees. In the end, no serious charges were brought against anyone, because the entire point was to keep people off the streets while Bush and his friends enjoyed their parties, and to dissuade others from attempting any further disruption.
Even then, it was clear that the arrests were illegal. They were, as the civil rights attorney Norman Siegel put it at the time, "preventative detention." The cops knew it, the city's lawyers knew it even as they denied it, and the mayor knew it.
The intrusive surveillance of Muslims that he approved as mayor was as outrageous as it was unnecessary. Conor Friedersdorf explains :
And he cannot be trusted to respect the civil rights of Muslims, as he illustrated after 9/11, when he presided over blatant religious profiling. Starting shortly after the attacks, officers infiltrated Muslim communities and spied on hundreds or perhaps thousands of innocents at mosques, colleges, and elsewhere.
These officers "put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity," the AP reported, citing NYPD documents. Informants were paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements. The NYPD even conducted surveillance on Muslim Americans outside its jurisdiction, drawing a rebuke from an FBI field office, where a top official charged that "the department's surveillance of Muslims in the state has hindered investigations and created 'additional risks' in counterterrorism."
Bloomberg defended the NYPD's counterterrorism efforts as necessary to keep New Yorkers safe, yet "in more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques," the AP reported, "the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation." The police acknowledged, in court, having generated zero leads.
Bloomberg's heavy-handed, abusive policies weren't just egregious violations of civil liberties, but they were also doing nothing to make the city more secure. Despite this, Bloomberg was a fervent defender of his policies until he realized that they would be a political liability for his current presidential campaign. Now he delivers unconvincing, dishonest "apologies" in an attempt to make people forget what he did. He still wants to use his time as mayor to argue that he is qualified for higher office, but he has to run away from one of his signature policies because he cannot justify it to Democratic voters. Bloomberg can't stand by his record because his record on these issues was awful, so why would voters trust him enough to promote him to an even more powerful position?
Friedman may think that the man is "a moderate progressive with a heart of gold" (yes, he said that), but the reality is that Bloomberg is an authoritarian oligarch whose contempt for Americans' constitutional rights runs like a red skein through his entire record. Pareene puts it this way:
Bloomberg said and did all these things because he is an authoritarian. He has explicitly argued that "our interpretation of the Constitution" will have to change to give citizens less privacy and the police more power to search and spy on them. In fact, he does not seem to believe that certain people have innate civil rights that the state must respect.
Like many other so-called "centrists," Bloomberg is a defender of intrusive state power and massive concentrated wealth. We are already familiar with how awful his foreign policy views are . Conservatives, libertarians, and progressives all have good reasons not to want him in charge of any government ever again. The thought of someone like this running the executive branch with all of the power that it possesses is terrifying.
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Feb 12, 2020 | theweek.com
The 2020 presidential race was always going to be an uphill battle for Elizabeth Warren.
Almost from the get-go, political pundits fretted about Warren's electability, setting in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy now reflected in the New Hampshire primary results . Warren's disappointing showing on Tuesday comes on the heels of a stirring debate performance and a strong third place finish in the Iowa caucuses -- two wins largely ignored by mainstream media commentators, who focused almost entirely on Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, with a spare thought for Amy Klobuchar's rise and Joe Biden's descent.
Defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election is priority number one for the Democratic establishment, and a moderate candidate with the potential to sway swing voters and Republican defectors has long been billed as the wisest course. But by constructing a dichotomy between the self-described revolutionary leader Sanders and the aggressively non-threatening trifecta of moderate candidates (not to mention Bloomberg, who is suddenly the darling of cable news), the networks and pundits with the greatest persuasive power have ignored and undercut Warren's unique potential to unite the progressive left and hesitant center.
Warren seems to have unfairly inherited some of the hallmarks of Hillary Clinton's reputation. Clinton's devastating 2016 upset sparked practical questions as to whether a woman could win the presidency at all. And Warren's false claim to Native American heritage sealed a reputation for untrustworthiness that has stuck long after that conversation faded away. If Clinton, with all of her name recognition and experience, couldn't win against Trump, what hope could there be for the woman widely considered her successor?
Warren's progressive policies and folksy demeanor also framed her for many as a sort of second-tier Sanders, not far enough left for the progressives and too far left for gun-shy moderates. But it is precisely this position that makes her the most electable candidate.
Warren and Sanders are mostly aligned on their signature issues, but how they present these issues is entirely different, as are their proposed paths to achieve them. Sanders does not shy away from the word "socialist." He declares outright that his Medicare-for-All plan will raise taxes. He says billionaires should not exist. These declarations and convictions are brave and they are admirable. But they also inspire commentators like Chris Matthews to worry on-air that a Sanders administration will begin executing the wealthy in Central Park, French revolution style.
Warren takes a more measured approach in selling her policies, focusing on how she'll achieve them rather than the eventual outcome. She doesn't say billionaires should not exist, she proposes a wealth tax. Warren doesn't say "socialist," choosing instead to present the economic and social advantages to her plans without the label. The other key difference between Sanders and Warren is that, while Sanders has identified as far left for his entire political career, Warren was a committed Republican long before she became a progressive Democrat. As other commentators have noted , this history might not earn her many points with committed leftists, but it does put her in a unique position to appeal to the moderates and Republicans that candidates like Buttigieg and Klobuchar are trying to court. After all, she used to be one of them. And perhaps most importantly, polls continue to show Warren performing just as well as those candidates, if not better, in hypothetical general election matchups against Trump.
Yet the mainstream media seems determined to undermine her viability.
Sanders and Buttigieg finished neck and neck in the Iowa Caucuses (whose dubious import is a conversation for another day), with Warren close behind in third. As the dust around the disastrous vote-counting began to settle, the media centered the conversation on Sanders, Buttigieg, and Biden. For example, this headline from The Washington Post reads: "Buttigieg and Sanders take lead, Biden fades in partial results from marred Iowa caucuses," ignoring Warren's close third place finish entirely in favor of Biden's fourth.
During Friday's Democratic debate, many critics noted the relatively short speaking time given to Warren in comparison with her white male competitors. Afterwards, coverage again focused on Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Biden, and Sanders, despite Warren having the highlight of the night, when she responded to Buttigieg's embarrassing stumble on a question about race.
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Feb 10, 2020 | www.youtube.com
Zach Wilkins , 1 day ago"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"
賢治 the Eagle , 3 days ago (edited)"They're not senile, they're just stupid" quote of the last 4 years, Democrats are losing it!
Cody Levinson , 2 days agoTucker is just hilarious! To think that an idiot like Biden was vice president is sad.
Joe McCaffery , 3 days ago"Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as White kids." -Joe Biden.
will draper , 3 days agoHe's just a stupid old man with an entitlement arrogance, so just like Clinton but male, Pelosi and so many others being the exact same and this is on both sides of the coin.
specialmitch , 2 days agotucker is literally roasting this man
Max Stevenson , 2 days ago (edited)"Turn on the record player" is just Biden flexing his hipster lifestyle.
John Boosh , 3 days ago"Your a lying dog faced pony soldier" r.i.p. Bidens campaign. I bet he'll be voting for Trump.
Taboo X , 3 days ago"Poor kids are just as talented as white kids" will always be my favorite
robert McGuckin , 1 day agoRegarding 6:23 "Children of a motherless goat!"
11DNA11 , 2 days agoFor a guy who extorted millions from Ukraine, China and Iraq, he sure seems cocky?
Mattador , 3 days ago"Record player on at night" I almost thought he'd suggest we'd keep our wax cylinder players on at night.
"We choose truth over facts" - Joe Biden That's correct Joe, democrats cling to their version of the "truth" while ignoring the facts.
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Feb 14, 2020 | www.unz.com
Realist , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 12:56 pm GMT
Trump is a member of the Deep State which is what I have been saying for almost three years.Reactionary Utopian , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:38 pm GMTThe Deep State consists of the very wealthy who are greedy for more wealth and power. There are 607 billionaires in the US. There is no reason for the Deep State members to formally collude they all know what needs to be done and how to do it. They use a relatively small amount of their money to place their minions in positions of power heads of the movie industry, the media, the federal government, academia. From then on if the lessers in these groups want to keep their jobs/lives they will toe the line. It becomes self sustaining from tax money and the Deep State glories in more wealth and power. Here is an excellent example of the Deep State in action: The SCOTUS has passed down egregious decisions that abridge the First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of a representative democracy. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing stupid SCOTUS decisions First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech thereby giving entities of wealth and power almost total influence in elections. By gaining control of the SCOTUS the Deep State is able to further their goals.Another take on the Deep State:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/14/understanding-the-deep-states-propaganda/Let's simplify things a little. We wouldn't all be having to puzzle over who's the most likely liar in the sandbox if we, uhhhh weren't there in the first place. Looking at you, Ronnie Ray-gun. And you, Bush the Elder. And you, Crimewave Clinton. And you, Gee-Dumbya. And you, O-Bomber. And you, Big Orange Tweet-Clown.Regardless of nominal "party," every nose is docked permanently to the Israeli fundamental aperture.
And we put up with it. We deserve what we get.
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Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
James McCumiskey , Feb 12 2020 13:59 utc | 1
QANONDoes anyone have any thoughts ideas on the QANON phenomenon. I have swayed between outright scepticism and then hope that it might be true - that some former high-ranking US military personnel have hatched a plan and co-opted Trump, to drain the swamp, truth about 9-11 and prosecute all those involved, deal with Israel, End the Fed and restore proper money etc.
Is it true? Or is it absolute bullshit and if so why?
m , Feb 12 2020 15:04 utc | 11
Robert Snefjella , Feb 12 2020 15:13 utc | 12QAnon=hope porn for Trump supporters. There's a video from a little over a year ago by a couple of guys who make some good points about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e_e5WI_mjg
Regardless of what one might think of the presenters, they have done their homework.QANONJayne , Feb 12 2020 16:17 utc | 24Is it true? Or is it absolute bullshit and if so why?
Posted by: James McCumiskey | Feb 12 2020 13:59 utc | 1
James, from my perspective Qanon's impact is far greater and more beneficial than indicated by the disparaging remarks that followed your question.
To be clear, I haven't paid a lot of attention to it, but have paid enough attention to understand that many tens of thousands of people have 'entered' and benefited from the QAnon 'school'.
Now this is not to pretend to know what the actual results will be or even what the actual intentions of Qanon are.
People who might be more or less in the process of waking up to, say, that we live in a kind of upside down world, have been given very many clues and crumbs to follow, to research. The process of waking up is a lifetime process, but it helps to begin at some point, to no longer just doze away through life.
Qanon begins with the observation that whereas pathological criminality on high gained power, became dominant over the vast majority of people, most people are more or less salt of the earth decent folks in their intentions.
But to 'unbrainwash' the brainwashed previously asleep requires a process of education. The Qanon process is somewhat reminiscent of a Socratic dialogue, whereby cryptic questions are posed, hints are given, but in the end, the spur is to 'go down the rabbit holes' and discover what's really going on.
Qanon suggests that the NSA and military include patriots who are trying to finesse a nonviolent transition away from the criminal pathology that has led the US to become an international vast organized crime organization, and purveyor of boundless atrocities.
Trump then is to be understood as a flawed but handy and workable temporary leadership means by which the system of tyranny can be decisively undermined.
Again, I'm not writing this as a fan of either Trump or Qanon, but am trying to answer your question beyond a reflexive jeer that appears common currency among the 'enlightened'.
Well! There is a rumor out there that Q is probably these guys:fnord , Feb 12 2020 16:28 utc | 25
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/11/17/breitbart-news-network-born-in-the-usa-conceived-in-israel/h/t: jtrue.com - I have an eclectic range on what I read... some I agree with ... some I don't... but things are getting so weird I 'don't throw the baby out with the bathwater'...
Interesting Bill Maher' take on Bannon... although coming across as 'the pot calling the kettle black...'
https://www.newswars.com/bill-maher-to-steve-bannon-i-wish-we-had-someone-on-our-side-as-evil-as-you/Also, interesting to note what issues Q never seems to touch.
gottlieb , Feb 12 2020 16:36 utc | 26Does anyone have any thoughts ideas on the QANON phenomenonNewly senile baby boomers and ideological conservatives psy-oping themselves. One of the myriad of mental gymnastics routines used by the conservative crowd to justify the continuation of the Obama presidency under Trump, which itself continued the Bush presidency, which continued the Clinton presidency... and on and on. A replacement for scientific social analysis by the equivalent of numerology and astrology, for people who don't know what science is and are probably distrustful of it to begin with. A good example: a friend of mine's dad is really hardcore into it. He's also a chiropractor. Not a coincidence. There's a certain type of cognitive style that will latch onto this kind of absurd shit and it's the duty of the scientifically minded to inoculate people against it.
Qanon is certainly a psyop. The question is whether it's a wishful thinking deep-state conspiracy theorist sitting in abasement with Cheetos and Dr. Pepper, or a disaffected rogue insider spreading crumbs of critical thinking to the dazed and confused mass of "Americans" who are victims of the greatest psyop in the history of the known universe; propagandized for 90 some years into the cult Baseball, Mom and Apple Pie.uncle tungsten , Feb 12 2020 18:01 utc | 37Whatever Qanon is it has allowed white nationalist fascists to believe they are freedom fighters on a grand quest to cleanse a swamp of corruption that is the true treason of the "American Dream."
The United States is two-party political monopoly, the two sides serving the same coin of 'the money power.' There is no more useful idiot than the raging stable genius who believes belligerence is wisdom, and money is love.
The United States is coming to a three-pronged fork in the road:
1. Collapse
2. Totalitarianism
3. RevolutionThe billionaires are preparing for collapse and turning to off-world escape. Bill Gates just ordered a ½ billion dollar hydrogen powered mega-yacht to ride it out in Waterworld.
Let those with ears hear.
QANON is a fraud. See Sessions, now Barr, Bolton, McCain. Frauds. So Q was needed right from thr beginning to divert people fom seing the Trump family business as usless.nietzsche1510 , Feb 12 2020 18:23 utc | 40The Trump WONT go after the greatest breaches of USA national security - Hillary and the unsecured email at her home cupboard or the Awan family spy/blackmail racket in the Dem congress members. QANON is cover for Trump family inaction.
QANON is useless for most but is a reference for those bloggers and YouTube commentators to fool people into thinkingthey are 'in the know', have deep information when all they have is tripe and hot air. So QANON is useful to fool fools, dupe dopes, and elevate the liar in chief.
How can it be that after three years as president Trump had Vinman and Ciaramela STILL on the NSC staff advising the White House? Then Bolton appointed was extreme blunder and then he betrayed Trump. QANON blows smoke over Trump family lightweights while they pick pocket the audience.
Rem , Feb 12 2020 19:02 utc | 46Bernie is not there to be president. his "community" job is to dog herd the progressive crowds to vote, as a lesser evil, for the Judeo-Zionist corporate candidate, the donors' choice, as he did servilely in 2016. ask him any question about foreign policy and you will note, on the spot, where he stands: he approved, as a Senator, the last 3 out of 4 major wars of the US empire. 95% of his domestic promises are undeliverable. we did love Obama, didn´t we? we will adore Bernie! for sure.
casey , Feb 12 2020 19:15 utc | 48Qanon is such garbage. Just look at what nietzshe1510 said about Bernie Sanders... The same crap is being pulled on people that follow Qanon. Its up to you to be the best person that you can be and make a difference in your family, one small group of people at a time, all over the planet. Like a tidal wave of good intentions. Never mind Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard or the media that support them. It is just a fu*kin gimmick.
Q = Unit 8200 (or one of its related agencies) to provide domestic cover for T as he vigorously pushes Zionist agenda.Joe , Feb 12 2020 20:05 utc | 55@1wyo , Feb 12 2020 20:14 utc | 56
Article about QAnon in Harper's Magazine. Takeaway seemed to be Qanon was conspiracy author building readership base for profit.
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/the-wizard-of-q/@1 "QUANON"HarryOrd , Feb 12 2020 20:38 utc | 60
Sounds like a fantasy from a Robert Heinlein novel; try "The Puppet Masters", or "Revolt in 2100". He also was a military officer, until he got invalided out.c1ue , Feb 12 2020 21:04 utc | 63The discussion about Qanon was enlightening. I voted for Trump but gave up on him after Seymour Hersh's article about the first Syria strikes was published in Germany(because, apparently, no U.S publisher wanted to touch it) I find myself drifting slowly back to the leftism of my youth since then. As for Bernie, his former comrade Michael Parenti implied in 2015 that Bernie is afraid of the National Security State crowd, and I think that makes sense. Bernie won't fight the Empire, which makes his domestic promises basically useless, regardless of his motives. Honestly, I think he mostly is in this for the campaign contributions, but who knows? He's a lot less relevant than a lot of people are willing to admit. The empire seems to be running out of steam on its own as far as I can see, as de-dollarization continues to gain momentum, particularly in Asia. Events in Iraq and places like the Philippines should be more interesting watch than this boring election
QAnon is nonsense.Parisian Guy , Feb 12 2020 23:47 utc | 88I looked into several of the more detailed predictions and comments - they were uniformly wrong, albeit loosely based on 1st level internet search results.
Fiction, not fact.Psyops? Anything is possible, but I personally don't see it. Trump does just fine handling Twitter himself.
My bet is that Qanon is simply Steve Bannon. Both have/had the same fake discourse and the same targets.
The revealing clue was for me when I saw his video clip "The great awakening".Who has ever peddled the Pizzagate without being himself a nuts? I only know Qanon and Bannon (by means of Cambridge Analytica)
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Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
uncle tungsten , Feb 13 2020 4:10 utc | 114
This is Jimmy Dore of Tucker Carlson show FoxTV.You would not ever have seen this on Fox at the last election. Best high voltage spit by Jimmy Dore I have seen.
Tucker shows a great smirk especially when Jimmy dumps on Guaido.
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Feb 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case in a cover story the magazine's Twitter account summarized as:
"Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who's gay and speaks Norwegian."
(The "Here's something random the Democrats need to beat Trump" story became an important literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico's "Can the "F-bomb save Beto?").
Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey consultant with "moderates." Reporters dug Pete; he's been willing to be photographed holding a beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a "killer instinct," i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.
Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete's name had not been read out in a Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the "gold standard" survey. The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid bare.
However, Pete's numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about "concern" that Buttigieg would not be able to win.
Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked "billionaires" in one stop, emphasized "unity" in the next, and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" or to chants of "It's time for a woman in the White House"). Was she an outsider or an insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?
A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn't win didn't help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders "hot mic" story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to take on Trump.
"It's like we all have PTSD from 2016," she said. "There has to be somebody."
... ... ...
What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg "in the lead."
The delays and errors cut in many directions, not just against Sanders. Buttigieg, objectively, performed above poll expectations, and might have gotten more momentum even with a close, clear loss, but because of the fiasco he ended up hashtagged as #MayorCheat and lumped in headlines tied to what the Daily Beast called a "Clusterfuck."
Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference (6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), Mayor Pete's lead for most of the week with "state delegate equivalents" -- the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to the Democratic convention -- made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner.
This wasn't necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is inherently somewhat random. If there's a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote winner can surely lose.
But the storylines of caucus week sure looked terrible for the people who ran the vote. The results released early favored Buttigieg, while Sanders-heavy districts came out later. There were massive, obvious errors. Over 2,000 votes that should have gone to Sanders and Warren went to Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer in one case the Iowa Democrats termed a "minor error." In multiple other districts (Des Moines 14 for example), the "delegate equivalents" appeared to be calculated incorrectly, in ways that punished all the candidates, not just Sanders. By the end of the week, even the New York Times was saying the caucus was plagued with "inconsistencies and errors."
Emily Connor, a Sanders precinct captain in Boone County, spent much of the week checking results, waiting for her Bernie-heavy district to be recorded. It took a while. By the end of the week, she was fatalistic.
"If you're a millennial, you basically grew up in an era where popular votes are stolen," she said.
"The system is riddled with loopholes."
Others felt the party was in denial about how bad the caucus night looked.
"They're kind of brainwashed," said Joe Grabinski, who caucused in West Des Moines.
"They think they're on the side of the right they'll do anything to save their careers.
An example of how screwed up the process was from the start involved a new twist on the process, the so-called "Presidential Preference Cards."
In 2020, caucus-goers were handed index cards that seemed simple enough. On side one, marked with a big "1," caucus-goers were asked to write in their initial preference. Side 2, with a "2," was meant to be where you wrote in who you ended up supporting, if your first choice was not viable.
The "PPCs" were supposedly there to "ensure a recount is possible," as the Polk County Democrats put it. But caucus-goers didn't understand the cards.
Morgan Baethke, who volunteered at Indianola 4, watched as older caucus-goers struggled. Some began filling out both sides as soon as they were given them.
Therefore, Baethke says, if they do a recount, "the first preference should be accurate." However, "the second preference will be impossible to recreate with any certainty."
This is a problem, because by the end of the week, DNC chair Tom Perez -- a triple-talking neurotic who is fast becoming the poster child for everything progressives hate about modern Dems -- called for an "immediate recanvass." He changed his mind after ten hours and said he only wanted "surgical" reanalysis of problematic districts.
No matter what result emerges, it's likely many individual voters will not trust it. Between comical videos of apparently gamed coin-flips and the pooh-poohing reaction of party officials and pundits (a common theme was that "toxic conspiracy theories" about Iowa were the work of the Trumpian right and/or Russian bots), the overall impression was a clown show performance by a political establishment too bored to worry about the appearance of impartiality.
"Is it incompetence or corruption? That's the big question," asked Storey.
"I'm not sure it matters. It could be both."
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com
Tucker , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT
I've heard and read about a claim that Trump actually called PM Abdul Mahdi and demanded that Iraq hand over 50 percent of their proceeds from selling their oil to the USA, and then threatened Mahdi that he would unleash false flag attacks against the Iraqi government and its people if he did not submit to this act of Mafia-like criminal extortion. Mahdi told Trump to kiss his buttocks and that he wasn't going to turn over half of the profits from oil sales.melpol , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:41 pm GMTThis makes Trump sound exactly like a criminal mob boss, especially in light of the fact that the USA is now the world's #1 exporter of oil – a fact that the arrogant Orange Man has even boasted about in recent months. Can anyone confirm that this claim is accurate? If so, then the more I learn about Trump the more sleazy and gangster like he becomes.
I mean, think about it. Bush and Cheney and mostly jewish neocons LIED us into Iraq based on bald faced lies, fabricated evidence, and exaggerated threats that they KNEW did not exist. We destroyed that country, captured and killed it's leader – who used to be a big buddy of the USA when we had a use for him – and Bush's crime gang killed close to 2 million innocent Iraqis and wrecked their economy and destroyed their infrastructure. And, now, after all that death, destruction and carnage – which Trump claimed in 2016 he did not approve of – but, now that Trump is sitting on the throne in the Oval office – he has the audacity and the gall to demand that Iraq owes the USA 50 percent of their oil profits? And, that he won't honor and respect their demand to pull our troops out of their sovereign nation unless they PAY US back for the gigantic waste of tax payers money that was spent building permanent bases inside their country?
Not one Iraqi politician voted for the appropriations bill that financed the construction of those military bases; that was our mistake, the mistake of our US congress whichever POTUS signed off on it.
...Trump learned the power of the purse on the streets of NYC, he survived by playing ball with the Jewish and Italian Mafia. Now he has become the ultimate Godfather, and the world must listen to his commands. Watch and listen as the powerful and mighty crumble under US Hegemony.World War Jew , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:42 pm GMTRight TG, traditionally, as you said up there first, and legally too, under the supreme law of the land. Economic sanctions are subject to the same UNSC supervision as forcible coercion.Charlie , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMTUN Charter Article 41: "The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations."
https://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/index.html
US "sanctions" require UNSC authorization. Unilateral sanctions are nothing but illegal coercive intervention, as the non-intervention principle is customary international law, which is US federal common law.
The G-192, that is, the entire world, has affirmed this law. That's why the US is trying to defund UNCTAD as redundant with the WTO (UNCTAD is the G-192's primary forum.) In any case, now that the SCO is in a position to enforce this law at gunpoint with its overwhelmingly superior missile technology, the US is going to get stomped and tased until it complies and stops resisting.
@Tucker This idea that the US is any sort of a net petroleum exporter is just another lie.Christophe GJ , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:00 pm GMThttps://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=268&t=6
In 2018 total US petroleum production was under 18 million barrels per day, total consumption north of 20 mmb/d. What does it matter if the US exports a bunch of super light fracked product the US itself can't refine if it turns around and imports it all back in again and then some.
The myths we tell ourselves, like a roaring economy that nevertheless generates a $1 trillion annual deficit, will someday come back to bite us. Denying reality is not a winning game plan for the long run.
I long tought that US foreign policies were mainly zionist agenda – driven, but the Venezuelan affair and the statements of Trump himself about the syrian oil (ta be "kept" (stolen)) make you think twice.OverCommenter , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:24 pm GMTOil seems to be at least very important even if it's not the main cause of middle east problems
So maybe it's the cause of illegal and cruel sanctions against Iran : Get rid of competitor to sell shale oil everywhere ?( think also of Norstream 2 here)
Watch out US of A. in the end there is something sometimes referred to as the oil's curse . some poor black Nigerians call oil "the shit of the devil", because it's such a problem – related asset Have you heard of it ? You get your revenues from oil easily, so you don't have to make effort by yourself. And in the end you don't keep pace with China on 5G ? Education fails ? Hmm
Becommig a primary sector extraction nation sad destiny indeed, like africans growing cafe, bananas and cacao for others. Not to mention environmental problems
What has happened to the superb Nation that send the first man on the moon and invented modern computers ?
Disapointment
Money for space or money for war following the Zio. Choose Uncle Sam !
Difficult to have bothEveryone seems to forget how we avoided war with Syria all those years ago It was when John Kerry of all people gaffed, and said "if Assad gives up all his chemical weapons." That was in response to a reporter who asked "is there anything that can stop the war?" A intrepid Russian ambassador chimed in loud enough for the press core to hear his "OK" and history was averted. Thinking restricting the power of the President will stop brown children from dying at the hands of insane US foreign policy is a cope. "Bi-partisanship" voted to keep troops in Syria, that was only a few months ago, have you already forgotten? Dubya started the drone program, and the magical African everyone fawns over, literally doubled the remote controlled death. We are way past pretending any elected official from either side is actually against more ME war, or even that one side is worse than the other.Just passing through , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:44 pm GMTThe problem with the supporters Trump has left is they so desperately want to believe in something bigger than themselves. They have been fed propaganda for their whole lives, and as a result can only see the world in either "this is good" or "this is bad." The problem with the opposition is that they are insane. and will say or do anything regardless of the truth. Trump could be impeached for assassinating Sulimani, yet they keep proceeding with fake and retarded nonsense. Just like keeping troops in Syria, even the most insane rabid leftoids are just fine with US imperialism, so long as it's promoting Starbucks, Marvel and homosex, just like we see with support for HK. That is foreign meddling no matter how you try to justify it, and it's not even any different messaging than the hoax "bring democracyhumanrightsfreedom TM to the poor Arabs" justification that was used in Iraq. They don't even have to come up with a new play to run, it's really quite incredible.
@OverCommenter A lot of right-wingers also see military action in the Middle East as a way for America to flex its muscles and bomb some Arabs. It also serves to justify the insane defence budget that could be used to build a wall and increase funding to ICE.Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 9:11 pm GMTUS politics has become incredibly bi-partisan, criticising Trump will get you branded a 'Leftist' in many circles. This extreme bipartisanship started with the Obama birth certificate nonsense which was being peddled by Jews like Orly Taitz, Philip J. Berg, Robert L. Shulz, Larry Klayman and Breitbart news – most likely because Obama was pursuing the JCPOA and not going hard enough on Iran – and continued with the Trump Russian agent angle.
Now many Americans cannot really think critically, they stick to their side like a fan sticks to their sports team.
The first person I ever heard say sanctions are acts of war was Ron Paul. The repulsive Madeleine Albright infamously said the deaths of 500,000 Iranian children due to US sanctions was worth it. She ought to be tried as a war criminal. Ron Paul ought to be Secretary of State.
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Feb 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,
If there is one thing that is clear as we end this truly insane week it is that it was a good one for President Donald Trump.
Between his acquittal in the Senate over an impeachment that is the apotheosis of three years of patent nonsense and the fiasco that were the Iowa caucuses, Trump comes out of this first week of February in better shape than he's been since he won the election back in 2016.
The Democrats have made a complete mockery of their candidate selection process. At least back in 2016 when Trump knocked people off one by one the GOP didn't openly try to rig primaries against him.
Of course, Trump isn't as much of an outsider as he portrays himself, so his real threat to the entrenched political establishment in The Swamp was never as great as someone like, say, Ron Paul's was in 2012.
But the depths the DNC are willing to dig deep to in order to stop Bernie Sanders from being their nominee are truly breathtaking. In 2016, the Clinton machine had declared her the candidate. Bernie was getting in the way of her coronation as the first woman president.
In 2020, however, no one actually running for the Democratic nomination, except maybe Bernie Sanders in a perfect world, can actually beat Donald Trump. So, the whole process is really academic at this point.
Honestly, after this week the only person who can beat Trump nationally is Trump himself. So, that leaves me with 65/35 odds he'll be re-elected.
But with impeachment behind him, an agenda of retribution against his accusers ahead of him and a Democratic party deep in the preparations for committing ritualistic suicide Trump should have no problem carrying at least as many states as he did in 2016.
Caitlyn Johnstone believes that the DNC's ineptitude is a ruse, a clever ploy to look stupid and corrupt but doing so to ensure their preferred outcome, which is a brokered convention and the return of Hillary Clinton from the grave, as I said recently , "like some zombie whose head we forgot to cut off."
While I love Ms. Johnstone's thesis, I think she's missing the much more salient point. As the Democrats flop from one fiasco to the next, they are doing two very important things.
- First, they invalidate the idea they operate as a functional organization. This excludes them as people who can solve the country's problems to voters who are pretty content with President Trump.
- Second, it sets the stage for an irrevocable split of the party itself as the Bernie Bros become more convinced the party doesn't represent them. I'm convinced that the end game for the DNC is to drive Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard from the party through these shenanigans.
This is why no matter who is eventually declared the winner in Iowa, the winner there is Donald Trump.
And, guess what? There's only 49 more states like this to go!
I'm really regretting swearing off popcorn.
The good news is that, for now, the markets recognize that the biggest threat to U.S. political stability has been averted. Stocks bolted to new all-time highs after Trump's acquittal, but couldn't follow through to end the week.
It only gets better from here if the DNC is set on sowing distrust, chaos beneath a veneer of practiced stupidity.
So, while there are a number of sincere challenges to global growth both right in front of us (the coronavirus) and far ahead of us (the growing insolvency of the European financial system now that Brexit is finished) equity markets are more than capable of rallying for the next few sessions.
But expect volatility to increase from here. The dollar is strengthening. While the euro narrowly avoided a catastrophic January close last Friday, the dominant bear trend reasserted itself with a vengeance this week, breaking below the all-important $1.10 level.
And that should finally see eurobond prices begin to collapse. The rally we've seen over the past two weeks has been nothing short of ridiculous. A classic 'false move.'
Oil is now in a bear market after 2018's reaction high above $86 per barrel Brent and the terrible results and guidance from industry leaders this week like Exxon-Mobil (XOM) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) only reinforce that view. If not for some noises from OPEC+ and the hopes that Russia will go along with extending current production cuts kept Brent from collapsing further this week as shorts piled on early.
But everything comes down to King Dollar and whether real fear which lurks just behind the headlines grips the plumbing of global markets, which had an outstanding week.
This surge in the dollar confirms the December low as significant which sets up a difficult few months. Given everything else we're experiencing from the shutdown of major Chinese cities, travel, etc. there's every reason to be cautious here even if the equity markets keep grinding higher, though I'd expect a whole lotta grinding sideways from both equities and gold while this goes on.
Expect a lot of this schizophrenic behavior as capital sloshes from stem to stern trying to figure out where it should best be deployed in this age of central bank heroin .
The central banks are still desperate to keep a lid on volatility to extend the lie that they have things under control, but if that's the case then why is the Fed still having to deal with repo market interventions being oversubscribed and the rate creeping back up toward its target Fed Funds rate and IOER (Interest on Excess Reserves)?
They've lost control over the short end of the yield curve.
And that's where things get interesting for this election cycle.
For Trump, the primary season should work out well as the Democrats continue imploding. And I have no doubt he will now go on the warpath to take down those who he rightly feels wronged him and the country. And he'll be merciless on Twitter using it to goad the Democrats into even more lunacy, more mistakes.
This is what he truly excels at and it will all but guarantee him surviving any crises that appear on the horizon between now and November.
For now, New Hampshire is next. Bernie should win the most votes it in a walk. But the real winner, regardless of anything else will be Trump.
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Alice-the-dog , 7 minutes ago link
HRClinton , 11 hours ago linkDNC is trying to drive Bernie and Tulsi out of the party. What they don't realize is that doing so will irrevocably drive more than their supporters out as well, as the party faithful realize their faith is unfounded.
LightBeamCowboy , 12 hours ago linkLet's not gloat too much here.
The GOP Old Guard screwed over the Libertarian wing also for years. Exhibit A: Ron Paul.
It boils down to this:
It does not matter if you are Democrat leaning or Republican leaning. As soon as you attempt to do any real and fundamental change, banksters bring out their big guns and fund whatever candidate or party to maintain the status quo. US elections are about tinkering around the edges, never about fundamental improvements that would be to the detriment of the banksters.
If you have an IQ >100, more than one testicle and the mental clarity, then you know that the true enemy is and always has been: International Banksters. Without them there could be no MIC, no Wars, no welfare for the rich and no excess of socialism for the poor. Without them, perpetual deficit financing would be impossible. They alone are the financial drug dealers who keep everyone addicted.
Nothing will change until you bring out the proverbial pitchforks, rope and guillotines.
Mzhen , 11 hours ago link"But with impeachment behind him, an agenda of retribution against his accusers ahead of him ..."
An "agenda of retribution" is exactly what Dems want us to think this is. But when these cases reach court, we'll find out that they are just normal criminal prosecutions, for real crimes, with real evidence, that would have been brought to the arrest phase a long time ago except that Trump has taken all the time necessary to gather evidence on the one hand, and to let the Dems exhaust their quiver of anti-Trump arrows on the other. Think back to July 5th, 2016 when James Comey went in front of the cameras and rattled off a long list of serious crimes by Hillary and then said she wasn't going to be prosecuted. Trump could have brought charges on January 20th, 2017 but he didn't. These last three years have been the largest, most thorough criminal investigation, of the largest number of people, in human history. Brace yourself for the next phase. And BTW, the sealed indictments are up to 144,844 nationwide.
stevesmith- , 15 hours ago linkNovember 9, 2019 -- "I caught the Swamp. I caught them all. Let's see what happens."
rtb61 , 16 hours ago linkIf were not for Bernie Sanders single-handily, we would not have 'democratic socialism' whatever that means...no one in the democratic party pushes socialism like he does...somehow Warren got 'tied up in the moment' and went with Medicare for All, then backed off. Let him win the nomination, he will be crushed, like Jeremy Corbyn, and the the USA 'socialist movement' will end...there are NO young Bernie Sanders out there...so another 4 years of Trump, but the democrats can remake themselves more center focused. If the Republicans win President, Senate and House, good chance for rebound as usually the ruling party takes the hit and dems get their chance again 2024...their is always hope. New leadership (Schumer, Pelosi and Perez) will also be needed required for a new era.
uhland62 , 16 hours ago linkThe Democrats are not imploding, the scam that turned the Democrat Party, the workers party, into another Republican party another bosses party, is failing. The democrats were more corrupt than the Republicans because the Clinton's sold the Democrats to the Corporations, pretended to be the workers party, whilst kicking all the workers out.
The scam is ending. Now the scam where the Republican party was stolen from conservative libertarians to the Corporations, also needs to be tackled.
The USA is a very long way from being a democracy.
algol_dog , 17 hours ago linkSanders and Gabbard can never be elected to high office. America gets it up on destroying other countries with wars.
As long as America rules the waves there can be no peace - peace candidates will be sidelined in all manner of ways.
HRClinton , 17 hours ago linkI disagree that Sanders can't beat Trump. It's 4 more years later, with another 4 years extra of youth able to vote for this guy. It's been stated before, the new generations have been brought up suckling on the socialist tit of the American school system and media for over 20+ years and they are as indoctrinated as any 20th Century socialist enthusiast. Only a matter of time before the chickens come home to roost. With Trump the battle may have been won, but the war will likely be lost unless something drastically changes. - My $.02
USAllDay , 16 hours ago linkIn another ZH article, Steve Banning pointed out that both Sanders and Trump have identified fundamental/similar problems in the country, but that they differ on how to solve them. Not sure about that being true of reality.
I'd argue that both parties are destroying the US with Crony Capitalism and Bifurcated Socialism.
Crony capitalism is letting the rich (1%) get richer.
Bifurcated Socialism is where the TBTF and the MIC get obscene amounts of fiat money on one extreme, and the very poor get just enough welfare to keep them from starting a French Revolution.
Everyone else in the middle (the 20-99%) has to deal with Darwinian Capitalism - survival of the fittest.
The only true winners are the banks and (((those))) closest to the source of money creation, because both militarism and socialism keep increasing the debt burden . Alas, 99.9% off the population and 95% of ZH bloggers fail to see this, and will opt to attack one side or the other - in this Banksters game of Divide and Conquer.
Central Banking is antithesis to Free Markets. The cost of interest is price fixed by a monopoly bank. Not only can the FED create money, but with that money they create artificial demand. The wealth gap will never close so long as the Federal Reserve exist.
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Feb 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com
up 10 users have voted."Would you take @MikeBloomberg 's money?" @ewarren : "SURE!"
The very same night Elizabeth Warren's big message is "I don't take billionaires' money!" Liz has the political instincts of Hilary Clinton. Trump will crush her.
pic.twitter.com/cM85kcPYUn-- Clark Feels The Bern (@Clarknt67) February 8, 2020
Raggedy Ann on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 4:50pm
She is so fake.@humphrey
I can hardly stand to listen to nor look at her. Sheesh!
We got this from 2 faced Liz.
"Would you take @MikeBloomberg 's money?" @ewarren : "SURE!"
The very same night Elizabeth Warren's big message is "I don't take billionaires' money!" Liz has the political instincts of Hilary Clinton. Trump will crush her.
pic.twitter.com/cM85kcPYUn-- Clark Feels The Bern (@Clarknt67) February 8, 2020
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Feb 08, 2020 | www.unz.com
"This President has done more for African Americans in this Country than any President since Lincoln." @LouDobbs
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2020
I voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
I spent months making the case for Trump on this website. I will be the first to admit that I was wrong and that those who were skeptical of Trump in our community were right in 2016. In that election, I drank the koolaid and was one of Trump's Chumps. Unlike AmNats, I have tried to learn something from that experience. I hate getting fooled by Republicans.
In 2020, we have a far better sense of Donald Trump. The Trump administration has a record now. Donald Trump's first term is mostly history. We can now look back with the benefit of hindsight and evaluate our standing after the last three years without being drunk on Trump koolaid. No one drank the Trump koolaid in our community more deeply than the AmNats. Some of them remained drunk on the Trump koolaid even after the 2018 midterms. A handful of his most faithful cheerleaders have never given up faith in their GOD EMPEROR and succumbed to reality.
What is the reality of the Trump presidency?
1.) Those who feared that the Trump administration would lull the conservative base into a false sense of complacency and put all the normies back to sleep were right. Donald Trump has told his base that they are "winning." They wear Q shirts and "Trust The Plan" at his rallies. They are Making America Great Again simply by having a Republican in the White House. They are content to go on believing that even as illegal immigration DOUBLED in FY 2019 and became a far worse problem than it ever was under the Obama administration. As we saw after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, they are also ready to swallow Trump's war propaganda against Iran and believe anything their dear leader tells them. It was Julian Assange and Roger Stone who went to prison under Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Normies are content to have conservatism in power and are less willing to give us an audience with a Republican in the White House.
2.) Those who feared that the Trump administration would suck all of the energy out of the Alt-Right were right . In the final two years of the Obama administration (2015 and 2016), the Alt-Right was thriving on social media and was brimming with energy. Four years later, the country has only gotten worse, but the brand has been destroyed and all the energy it had back then as an online subculture has been sucked out of the room by Trump and channeled into pushing the standard conservative policy agenda. The movement has been in disarray and has been divided and demoralized ever since Trump won the 2016 election. The last few years have been terrible. As soon as Trump won the 2016 election, conservatives shifted their attention back to policing their right flank. They are far more successful at policing their right flank when they are in power.
3.) Those who rationalized voting for Donald Trump on the basis of immigration and changing demographics were proven wrong about that too. He has refurbished the George W. Bush era fence. Since he has been president, Donald Trump has built all of three new miles of fence , which is actually less than W. and Obama. He didn't do anything about sanctuary cities or pass E-Verify. He has actually increased guest worker programs . There has been no cuts to legal immigration. Instead, Jared Kushner's legal immigration plan only proposes to reconfigure the composition of it for big business so that more high skilled workers and fewer peons are imported from the Third World. Illegal immigration has remained steady and has surged past the worst highs of the Obama years. It has recently fallen back to 2015 levels after peaking in FY 2019 . Trump has vowed to pass an amnesty to save DACA. The Muslim ban became an ineffective travel ban . The only area where he has had any real success is refugee resettlement, but overall the bottom line is that after four years of Trump there are millions of more illegal aliens and legal immigrants here. Donald Trump hasn't even deported as many illegal aliens as Obama .
4.) Those who voted for Donald Trump to "move the Overton Window" succeeded in making homosexuality more acceptable on the Right. This was already clear by the time of the Deploraball at Trump's inauguration. In the Trump era, homosexuals and drag queens would be accepted into the fold on the Right and White Nationalists would remain stigmatized. Congress has actually condemned White Nationalism at least two or three times since Donald Trump has been president. Far more White Nationalists have gone to prison under Donald Trump than Barack Obama. Trump has appointed "conservative judges" like Thomas Cullen who put RAM in prison . Some of Trump's Chumps point to Bernie Sanders vowing to "declare war" on White Nationalism after the El Paso shooting. They conveniently forget the fact that National Review and conservatives ALSO declared war on White Nationalism last August . We've been covering the government crackdown which has been going on since last August .
AmNats have been purged from Turning Point USA, banned from its events and reduced to haranguing Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk from the sidewalk. They have been banned from even attending CPAC. Those who thought that they could work within the system to reform conservatism were grossly mistaken. Steve King was condemned by Congress, stripped of his committee assignments and has been treated as a pariah within the Republican Party . Michelle Malkin was deplatformed by Mar-a-Lago and excommunicated from the synagogue of mainstream conservatism. Ann Coulter was marginalized in the Trump administration. Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon were both fired. Donald Trump hired conservatives and staffed his administration with his enemies. While I won't name any names, I will just point to all the people who actually worked within the conservative movement who have all been purged and fired in the Trump era by Conservatism, Inc. as proof that working within the system doesn't work and is a bad idea and those people would have had more job security doing almost anything else.
5.) What about Antifa and Big Tech censorship? Aren't those good reasons to vote for Donald Trump in 2020? Neither of these issues were on our radar screen BEFORE Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Both of those problems became dramatically worse as a result of electing the boogeyman as president . Far from being a victory for the Dissident Right, we became identified with Donald Trump and were caught in the backlash while he delivered Jeb Bush's agenda (the boogeyman wasn't real). Before Trump was elected president, Antifa was a tiny nuisance that protested Amren conferences and there was still a great deal of free speech on the internet. We could also hold rallies all over the South without serial harassment from these people. Now, everything from harassment and doxxing by "journalists" to chronic Antifa violence to police stand down orders to deplatforming to FBI counterextremism witch hunts has became part of the scenery of life under the Trump administration which is only interested in these new grievances insofar as they can be milked and exploited to elect more Republicans. In hindsight, it would have been better NOT to have identified ourselves with the boogeyman in 2016.
6.) Isn't having Donald Trump in the White House a huge victory for "identitarianism" and big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." President Donald Trump's signature policy victories have been passing a huge corporate tax cut, criminal justice reform and renegotiating and rebranding NAFTA. Trump is a "populist" in the sense that he has DEEPENED neoliberalism. When you look at his policies, he has continued and further extended the status quo of the last forty years which has been tax cuts, deregulation, entitlement cuts, free trade agreements and huge increases in military spending. Trump's economic agenda has been no different from the last three Republican presidents. He has been all bark and no bite.
Donald Trump is pointedly NOT a nationalist, populist or identitarian. He carefully avoids ever mentioning the word "White." Instead, he talks incessantly about the black, Hispanic, Asian-American, LGBTQ and female unemployment rate. He holds events at the White House for blacks and Hispanics. He delivers policies for blacks and Hispanics too like criminal justice reform. The "forgotten man" couldn't be further from Donald Trump's mind when he is schmoozing with the likes of Steve Schwarzman and boasting about the stock market. Trump is a demagogue who recognized that nationalist and populist sentiments were growing in the American electorate and he has harnessed and manipulated and exploited those forces for his donors.
7.) Speaking of Trump's donors, we wrote Trump a blank check in the 2016 election to deliver on the MAGA agenda that he had sold us. We voted for big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were immigration, trade, foreign policy, political correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas of "nationalism" and "populism." He has been a disappointment on all fronts.
Those of us who were duped into believing that Donald Trump had a team of Jews who were going to craft all of these policies which were going to stabilize America's demographics should reflect on what has actually happened during the Trump presidency. Orthodox Jews hit the jackpot with the King of Israel and Zionists have been on an unprecedented winning streak. In just the last three months, Trump has issued an executive order to ban anti-Semitism on college campuses, assassinated Qasem Soleimani and has given Bibi Netanyahu the green light to annex large swathes of the West Bank. Trump is even considering allowing Jonathan Pollard to return to Israel. Is it any wonder then that a recent Gallup poll found that Israelis support his "America First" foreign policy over Americans by a whopping 18-point margin?
Trump's Chumps haven't been deterred by any of this. They want us to write Donald Trump a second political blank check in 2020, which his Jewish donors intend to cash at the White House, only this time he won't be restrained by fear of losing his reelection . In light of everything he has delivered for them so far, what is Donald Trump going to do in his second term for his Jewish donors who fund the GOP? Do we trust Trump not to start a war with Iran?
8.) In the last two elections, Donald Trump has pulled a bait-and-switch and Trump's Chumps are gullible enough to fall for it a third time. While I was wrong about the 2016 election, I was one of the first voices in our community to wise up to what was going on. By the 2018 midterms, I saw the bait-and-switch coming and warned our readers about it.
As you might recall, the 2018 midterms were about tax cuts and the roaring economy, deregulation and putting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. It was also full of dire warnings about scary Antifa groups, Big Tech censorship and caravans from Central America to stir up the base. Trump vowed to issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship. The GOP knows what its base cares about and shamelessly manipulates its base during election season.
After the 2018 election was over, you might recall how Trump banned bump stocks and passed criminal justice reform for Van Jones and the Koch Brothers during the lame duck session of Congress. As we entered 2019, the Republican agenda changed to overthrowing the government of Venezuela to install Juan Guaidσ in power and passing anti-BDS legislation. The GOP spent the whole year accusing the Democrats of anti-Semitism and promoting Jexodus. Virtually nothing else was talked about for a whole year in Congress but anti-Semitism until Trump issued his executive order on anti-Semitism on college campuses after the House and Senate had failed to reach agreement on anti-BDS legislation. The White House held its Social Media Summit in July and nothing came out of it . Antifa disappeared from the agenda and was replaced by a government crackdown on White Nationalists after El Paso. Ending birthright citizenship was forgotten about. Illegal immigration soared to its highest level in over a decade last May.
Don't forget how Trump's Chumps told us how "Chad" it was in 2018 to elect more Republicans to stop Antifa, the caravans and Big Tech censorship and how those same Republicans once elected to office preferred to fight anti-Semitism for AIPAC.
9.) In the last election, Trump's Chumps were manipulated into splintering their own movement by GOP operatives who divided and conquered and data mined the Dissident Right. When Ricky Vaughn was exposed as a Republican operative named Douglass Mackey who was scraping Paul Nehlen's Facebook in order to feed the information into the Smartcheckr database, Trump's Chumps loudly denounced Nehlen for doxxing Vaughn. Strangely, they had nothing to say when Smartcheckr which became Clearview AI sold that database and its facial recognition tool to the FBI and hundreds of other law enforcement agencies .
https://www.youtube.com/embed/-JkBM8n8ixI?feature=oembed
10.) Trump's Chumps have demonstrated in the last two election cycles how easy they are to manipulate. They can be relied on to vote and shill for the GOP no matter what it does. Donald Trump isn't under any pressure from these people to change. He knows his mark better than they know themselves. They are so desperate for acceptance and to participate in elections and to feel like they are "winning" that they will delude themselves like the rest of his cult into believing almost anything. Give a drowning man enough rope and he will hang himself.
Four years later, Trump's Chumps are still sitting by the phone waiting for the Donald to call back while he huddles with Steve Schwarzman and Bibi Netanyahu. They can't see what is front of their own eyes. By going ALL IN for Trump, they wrecked, divided and demoralized their own movement in order to advance the standard conservative policy agenda. They have been pushed off the internet and in some cases even to the dark web. In virtually every way, they are worse off than they were four years ago and have nothing to show for it. Insofar as they are getting more web traffic, it is because America has only continued to deteriorate under Trump, which would have happened anyway regardless who won in 2016.
It's not too late for Trump's Chumps to reclaim one thing that they have lost over the past four years. They can still reclaim their self respect. They don't have to participate in this charade a second time and mislead people who are less informed because they now know full well that Sheldon Adelson has bought Donald Trump and the lickspittle GOP Congress.
Note: Imagine thinking a New York City billionaire is a "populist." LMAO what were we thinking? He told us what we wanted to hear and we believed it.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/zgJC4Pu_tbo?feature=oembed
https://www.youtube.com/embed/6-sATHRO0jo?feature=oembed
Priss Factor , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:06 am GMT
Trump killed a true hero and man of God Soleimani.MattinLA , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:11 am GMTTrump is scump.
My understanding is that net foreign immigration has gone down in the last few years. Hardly a triumph, I agree. There are quite literally hordes of foreigners living here. Even a president who was a combination of Jesus and Superman would find it excrutiatingly difficult to eliminate immigration under these circumstances.Peter Akuleyev , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:24 am GMTWe face no good choices, unfortunately.
All this seemed painfully obvious to me in 2016. We all know who Trump had been the first 70 years of his life a braggart, a reprobate and a real estate developer who loved celebrities and organized crime figures. He is married to a high class escort from Slovenia who speaks English worse than a Mexican immigrant. This man is going to be the savior of Western Civilization? He has always been a fraud.Peter Akuleyev , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:30 am GMT@MattinLA Trump has not even made a sincere effort. Where is the effort to stop birth right citizenship? To punish employers who hire illegals? He doesn't try to build a coalition to stop immigration, he is clearly using it as political issue to keep his low info base revved up, but Trump doesn't actually want it resolved. It is the same with abortion, where both Parties are perfectly happy with the status quo because it allows each to fund raise by pointing at the threat coming from the other side. And at the end of the day it is all about find raising.Gizmo880 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:54 am GMTPretty much an accurate article, but what Democratic Presidential Contender would have been a better choice? The answer is none. The modern day Democratic Party, and most everyone who identifies with it, is as morally disgusting and filthy of a political party as has ever existed on this planet. Whatever grievances you have with DT, wait until the next Democrat gets elected President. The trifecta of Diversity (aka hate and blame Whitey for everything), LGBTQ insanity, and Climate Change hysteria will be shoved down the throats of this country like never before. The Obama years were just a warm-up for the cultural destruction that will happen to this country when the next Dem gets elected.EliteCommInc. , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 6:16 am GMTActually, just bring the Civil War on. Whites will either get some self-respect and stand up for themselves before it is too late, or surrender to living in a ghetto trash culture and being ruled over by Jews and their white hating 'POC' puppets. It's an easy choice in my book.
I started college in 1982 with nothing but high hopes for the future, by 1990 I knew something was terribly going wrong with this country, and now I know the destruction of this country is virtually guaranteed. No good choices, indeed, as stated above. WTF happened?
I voted for this executive. I am not ashamed of my vote. However, as someone who voted on agendas and policies, I disappointed with the results. I knew going in there wasn't much in store for me personally by supporting the candidate. it was a diversion at the time from the standard fare. The problem with the standard fare is that they offered more of what were the problems. candidate Trump, actually responded to the issues echoing the same concerns, even if in a less than civil tenor. He gave as good as he got or better. I would that had been more substantive, but it was what it was.Father O'Hara , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 6:24 am GMTThere are some things that need to be cleared up in your article, most prominant of which is the fairly loose use of straw men positions. Just a few:
the president did not run as a conservative despite comments he made about some conservative aspects of his own views.
he never ever abandoned his position on same sex relations and marriage -- both of which are neither conservative or something he campaigned on, so it was clear from the get go, he had no intention of changing that game. What he did contend is that religious people have the same protections and they should not be cowed
the overton window that would permit any president to openly support a condition in which skin color is the primary or a primary point of view would violate the principles and foundation of the country. but regardless most of the country sees that as an anathema to the what they want to country to be -- even far right conservatives are not arguing a white nationalist perspective -- trying to weigh him down with an overton window position that was never in play, at least not as you suggest it. The president started with a definitive lean in that direction of sorts, but it probably did not take him, long to figure out -- he was surrounded by whites in control of the country -- whites are not being pushed around by non-whites, inspite of having elected a non-white executive. But still he has knee jerk responses to dismantle the nonwhites policies. He remains as prowhite as any candidate in office. his references to how he claims to have aided nonwhites as pushback against accusations of being "racist" makes perfect sense. That does not make him "anti-white".
your bait and switch assail is a tad convoluted. Antifa big tech and tax cuts . . . big tech and antifa initially responded with the same shock and vitriol as all his opposition when he was elected -- but as time has worn big tech has moved on seeing the current exec as a nonthreat -- tax cuts proceed unimpeded. The president's position on Jews and Israel were clear from the start and remain as they were -- one can contend he is overboard, but there was no bait and switch. The president did not say I was not for Israel and pro limiting immigration, he made clear he opposed illegal immigration and was proIsrael they are not competing issues . He has simply abided by one and dragged his feet on the other, if not abandoned it all together.
There are some other issues that need addressing, not the least of which is that many of us who supported the current executive before and now, have done so calling him out on issues where he has failed or is failing and have done so from the start -- -
On that I think my self respect remains intact
Harvey Weinstein posed a question to one of his conquests: Do you like my fat Jewish dick? Trumps answer is apparently," Hell yeah!"anon_382 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 6:32 am GMT@Priss Factor the scary part about that is blumpf and the (((deep state))) would do that to you or me tooCrazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:04 am GMTit was sickening to see that he seemed to have regained his self confidence from the assassination of Soleimani and was blathering on at the SOTU as though everything was just fine, better than ever
One good thing Trump did was save us from that shrieking Valkyrie warmongering Hildabeast. If she had been elected she would have taken it as a mandate to start a war with Russia and/or Iran. Personally I was never voting for Trump but against Hillary.alex in San Jose AKA Digital Detroit , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:04 am GMTNow that the demoncrats no longer have someone like Hillary running it would be pretty safe to vote a third party which I plan to do this election. Screw King Cyr-ass and his Zionist claque of losers.
@MattinLA The US economy alone (not to mention the suckiness of the culture and people) has been bad enough going back to a year or so before the crash that net immigration, I believe, has been outward. Stupid Orange Man yelling at people "Get outta here! You're fired!" means less when they calmly retort, "I was leaving anyway".nsa , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:28 am GMT@MattinLAGleimhart Mantooso , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:33 am GMT"net foreign immigration has gone down .."
Happened to be in the Emerald city on Wednesday and wandered through the Seattle Convention Center .there were so many hindoos milling about thought it was some kind of curry cooking convention.
But no .it was something called Microsoft Ready which is Microsoft's internal marketing, technical, and sales event bringing together over 21,000 Microsoft staff.
Had to be at least 75% dotheads with a sprinkling of turbanized Sikhs, and maybe 25% whites and asians. Asked one of the dotheads if Paul Allen would be attending this year, but just drew a quizzical stare.
Noted in the Mr. Softie handouts that these legions of imported cut rate code scribblers are referred to as "scientists". Trumpstein actually did something about the H1B visa program .he increased it claiming we need more of these half priced "brainiacs". Can't find enough discount American code scribblers, you know.
Trump first got my attention when he made those initial comments against the illegal invasion. But later, when he said that Mexico was going to pay for the wall and talked about putting a "big beautiful door" in it, I figured he was probably full of it. When he attended AIPAC, I was done.eah , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:40 am GMTChet Roman , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:53 am GMTCongress has actually condemned White Nationalism at least two or three times since Donald Trump has been president. Far more White Nationalists have gone to prison under Donald Trump than Barack Obama. Trump has appointed "conservative judges" like Thomas Cullen who put RAM in prison.
After the last 3 years of seditious behavior of lying politicians like Schiff, Nadler and Pelosi and the traitorous schemes of deep state actors like Weismann, Vindman, Sondland and Yovanovitch I would still vote for Trump in the hopes that some of these traitors and others in the DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA would be prosecuted. Hopefully, Durham will do his job before the election and we will see some of the coup plotters going to jail. Even if that doesn't happen, a final payback to the treacherous Democrats and their propagandists in the MSM will be another conservative judge on the Supreme Court; a change that will impact the next 30+ years. That alone will be enough for me.Divine Right , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:57 am GMTI agree with much of the analysis I've read here, but let me offer a somewhat different perspective. The author notes that, "Donald Trump is pointedly NOT a nationalist, populist or identitarian." This is probably true, but it's also not necessarily a bad thing at this point if you're a contrarian of this sort.Nonny Mouse , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:59 am GMTMy read of the situation is that Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the general election, despite the confident predictions of an incoming Trumpslide by deluded supporters. In his defeat, he'll take the last vestiges of Reagan conservatism down with him. Even if he doesn't, Trump will almost certainly be the last republican president due to demographic change, so it doesn't matter either way. It would make sense in that light to let Mr. Trump run and lose on a platform of standard fare conservatism than have him be closely associated with populism and discredit that ideology on his way out.
People forget that Donald Trump was only made possible by Mitt Romney's failure in 2012. Romney ran a standard conservative, milquetoast campaign and lost; he was nevertheless called all manner of vile names by the left but responded like a gentlemen. His defeat came as quite a shock to many rank and file GOPers. Fox News had convinced them leading up to election day that they were going to win. How could they not? Romney said all the same things Ronald Regan did and he won; he talked up the military, he repeated economic platitudes and denounced socialism, he self-immolated over racial issues and claimed democrats were the real racists. So, obviously, Mitt Romney should by all rights win just as Reagan did. Lost on them was the demographic situation, among other things. 2012 America was not 1980 America. When Reagan won California in 1980, Los Angeles was majority white; California had two million more white Caucasians than it does now (Trump and Reagan received almost exactly the same number of white votes in California but with different results); the economy for blue collar voters was better, so there was less opposition to Reaganomics.
When Romney ran as a traditional, non-offensive republican and lost, he discredited that ideology and made a louder, more combative alternative possible. That was Donald Trump. In the minds of many republicans, conservatism could no longer win elections, so why not go all in with a contrarian radical? I expect that mentality to return sometime after Trump loses this November. Radical sentiment has been quieted as of late only because normies sheepishly think they are winning. That's probably why the establishment is freaking out: they know that won't last. You occasionally see moderate democrats asking for peace and quiet, perhaps realizing this, but it's unfortunately not a message well-received by the fringe left who control social media and these divisive late night network shows.
My prediction: on election night 2020, there will be a lot of shell-shocked republican normies. Either the despised socialist is elected or a man who stokes racial animus for personal gain Pete Buttigieg will become president-elect. In the minds of conservative Boomers, that wasn't supposed to happen; it's as if someone said they could see inside the event horizon of a black hole total violation of established physical reality. Impossible or so they thought. Republican operatives are already trying to help Bernie Sanders in both Iowa and South Carolina. They foolishly think Sanders can't win, but that's not true. I've seen the polls. On election night, Donald Trump will have to deliver a heart-wrenching speech to his deluded followers conceding defeat to someone they thought couldn't win.
But the Trumpslide. Qanon said to trust the plan*. We're winning. The wall. MAGA.
All exposed as lies. The sort of lies a defeated people tell themselves. Cerebral comfort food for the weak-minded.
In the process, Donald Trump will discredit Conservatism Inc. just like Mitt Romney did in 2012. Contrarians will escape the judgment of history and live to fight another day. Most likely, there are yet more dissident stars on the right to be made. Some older ones may also return in the aftermath.
Considering circumstances, the best path forward (speaking as devil's advocate) is to critique the man without vocally supporting his defeat. Let him go down fair and square. Starting in November, there will many republicans in Trump's former base looking for an alternative. They will seek out dissidents they heard about but dismissed as blackpillers; MAGA supporters will be sidelined. Third Way Alternatives should consider laying out a well-reasoned, practical and achievable alternative in the present with the anticipation they will be called upon in the near future.
However, I wouldn't count on that considering the lack of organization and drive I see on the dissident right. Mr. Griffith's essay, for example, is filled with a strange defeated tone. It sounds as if he just wants to go back to business as usual before Trump: do his contrarian thing without being harassed. Certainly, life would be easier. But you would be no closer to any kind of victory, either. As the author notes, dissidents were tolerated before Trump. But why? I think laying the full blame on Trump is not warranted. Yes, he failed to protect his followers that's one big reason why dissent is now being crushed. There is another reason, however: you were winning. You were only tolerated before because you were on the wrong side of history. The establishment didn't fear you because you couldn't challenge them. With Trump's surprise victory, the situation changed. With that in mind, what's the point of going back to business as usual while being on a certain path to defeat? unless you want to lose (or don't care), unless you simply want the freedom to be a contrarian without accomplishing anything. Sounds like a grift to me, pardon the rudeness.
If you want to ineffectually complain about the ruling class on Twitter while being free of harassment, then supporting the democrat is probably your best bet. They'll tolerate you because you don't threaten them. I think that's what a lot of guys on the right really want, which is why they went so heavily into Yang's UBI. It was a sort of early retirement option for them, regardless of how they justified it get free money and cash out, let the world burn.
*Well, that and to drink bleach to ward off the wuhan coronavirus. Do NOT trust that plan.
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as a neutral third party who was never involved in any of this stuff.
But what's this "United" muck? How much better the world would be without that muck! (Says an Australian.)Daniel Rich , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:07 am GMTTo distill the above into something simple: ' you' are what you vote .Mea Culpa , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:16 am GMTLuckily you learned a lesson. Cherish it.
Idiotic article. Yeah, Trump is a Trojan horse who is making. Israel great again. Yeah, he's a fragile, narcissistic buffoon. The only unabashed positive I can really offer is that he is in 2020, as he was in 2016, the least bad option.The Alarmist , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:27 am GMTThe author doesn't seem to quite get numbers. God, as they say, tends to favor the side with the biggest battalions. Perhaps he should take a look at a demographic plot of the map of the United States circa 2020. The truth is that, if a hyper-competent, charismatic candidate had formed a consensus around Trump's 2016 platform in maybe 1975, the demographic trajectory of the country could have been changed. It's way, way too late for that.
If you were stupid enough to think in 2016 that demographic realities were going to be unwound, or even that there could consensus to address the issue in a serious unapologetic way, I really don't know what to tell you. You're probably too stupid to be operating heavy machinery, much less posting articles on Unz. Trump's election is Prop 187, circa 1980's. Far too little, far too late. But still the least bad option.
All there really is at this point is a rearguard action, and maybe win a skirmish here and there. In terms of the Long War, we don't have the numbers or the consensus. Grow the fuck up.
I'm often asked by people in the US who learn I've lived outside the US the better part of three decades when I might return to the US, to which I lightly reply, "When the Republic is restored. I guess that means never."Biff , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:34 am GMTAt the end of the day, who better than Trump can you get behind? I guess it is game over. The only problem is that the rest of the developed world is going in the same problemmatic direction, and places like Uruguay still have their occasionally lurches into insanity.
Gleimhart Mantooso , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:37 am GMT2.) Those who feared that the Trump administration would suck all of the energy out of the Alt-Right were right.
This is very typical. In the waning days of G.W. Bush there was a very strong hard left anti-war movement in place, and doing well on the internet, and also had a home on some cable stations. Once Obama was elected it faded into obscurity with-in hours, and never resurrected even as Obama become more hawkish than Bush both expanding the War on Terror, and codifying the Bush Doctrine.
Dupes all around.
@Priss Factor Soleimani was no man of God. He was a muslim, which is the opposite.Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:42 am GMTOk, let's see,Thulean Friend , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:54 am GMT1. Trump was a con man as a businessman. How did anyone imagine he wouldn't be a con man as president?
2. Trump knows which side his bread is buttered. How long do you imagine he would've lasted if he actually did the things he promised, especially ending the Amerikastani Empire, before ending like Kennedy? Six weeks?
3. Whether the author of this article, with whom I sympathise, changes any minds with it is irrelevant. Trump is the Wall Street/military industrial complex/zionist candidate for re election, and his return to power is being arranged even as I write this. The shambolic Daymockratic Party impeachment circus and the bad jokes posing as candidates in their primaries have one purpose alone: to ensure a second term for Donald Trump. What any normal person votes for is irrelevant.
A common trope on the right is that the left gets what it wants. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just witness the shenanigans the DNC is pulling in the current primaries. When Pelosi theatrically ripped up Trump's speech in the SOTU, she shortly thereafter voted to support the efforts to destabilise Venezuela and support the CIA-handpicked Juan Guaido.freedom-cat , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 9:00 am GMTPro-Israel PACs have flooded the primaries attacking Bernie. CIA puppet Pete Buttigieg is against medicare for all. Democrats do not get what they want. The only thing they get is woke rhetoric but the neoliberal economic system and the imperialist foreign policy remains the same.
Jimmy Dore's reference to the "uniparty" is apt here. So while Mr Griffin's catalogue of Trump's various betrayals is useful, keep in mind that the disease is bipartisan. The US is in many ways a sham democracy where the actors perform kabuki theater. You will never get an honest say on the core principles of the system. Regardless if you're coming from the right or the left. And the media is in on the charade.
Tricky Trump.Nodwink , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 9:06 am GMTHe is so duplicitous it's mind boggling. Nancy Pelosi is right when she calls him a liar, although she's no angel herself.
The Jewish Power structure is in total control. Trump WILL BE the final nail in USA coffin, because he is dictating for Israel, now. Israel will make even bigger moves after he is re-elected, for sure. No doubt to further the Yinon plan along.
I voted for him too; but will not be voting at all this year. I refuse to play into their twisted game.
They purposely caused all this Chaos to keep people distracted while Big Tech companies consolidate their power over the internet and the Military Industrial Complex plans the next false flag to kick off the next invasion (Iran & Syria).
My guess is that Jewish Democrats like Schiff, Nader, and proxy Nancy have all been part of this horrible PsyOp that has been going down the last 3 years.
It doesn't matter which "side" you are on anymore because there is really only ONE SIDE.
I wouldn't feel bad about being a "Trump Chump" there are millions of you, after all.NPleeze , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 9:51 am GMTAs someone who would be in the Bernie/Tulsi camp if I lived in the USA (but would also be furiously opposed to being swamped by Somalis), here's a little advice, free of charge:
You will never get anywhere being attached to a Party of Capital. They will always want to bring cheap labour into your country, and they don't care what those immigrants do to your family. Money rules. Forget the GOP, and start your own party.
sally , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 9:51 am GMTImagine thinking a New York City billionaire is a "populist." LMAO what were we thinking? He told us what we wanted to hear and we believed it.
Not just a NY billionaire, but one who profited from (a) mega-banks, and (b) the ZioNazi media.
His first two reality TV stunts were WWE, and then The Apprentice. The third is his crown achievement.
You call them Trump's Chumps, I've called them TrumpTARDs, because they are fucking useless, mindlessly idiotic fools/rednecks/inbred losers.
Fact is the country doesn't stand a chance, the "resistance" is more pathetic than the globlalists. If the last three years has taught the world anything, it's not just how mindlessly stupid TrumpTARDs are, but how uncivil, rude, aggressive, and downright despicable.
Nobody has harmed the conservative cause more than the Orange Satan.
All, of course, by design. What still gets me is that conservatives are to utterly stupid to fall for it. At least the Liberals caught on that Obama was a fake early on the TrumpTARDs just can't get enough of sucking that Orange ZioNazi's dick.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52960.htm” ; < Coronavirus & Global CollapseNPleeze , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 9:54 am GMThttps://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/congress-exxon-mobil-eastmed-pipeline-cyprus/ =<pipeline
this who thing looks related to me.. .. the Cornoavirus, the pipeline, the bombings in Syria, the libya-turkey GNA thing, the recent airliner crash in Turkey, I feel something is surfacing
Trump proved that the nation state system is disastrous for those humans governed by it. The nation state system is great for those few who are the puppet governors of the few that rule the world.
The problem Mr. Griffin is that the article does not recognize that USA citizens who not part of the electoral college cannot vote for either the President or the Vice President. Amendment 12 read it.
We should Trumpet Trump because if we don't we might be next..
@MattinLAGeorge Lincoln , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 10:01 am GMTThere are quite literally hordes of foreigners living here.
Fact is none of the fake conservatives, from the Orange Satan to the Governor of Texas, is against illegal immigration. It would be easy enough to prosecute employers who hire illegals, but neither the Orange Satan, nor any State, be it Wyoming or Texas, so-called "Red" (Communist) states, does anything about it.
But yet the idiot TrumpTARDs wail on and on about how the Orange Satan is their savior and how Republicans are better than Democrats.
It's amazing how unbelievably, astoundingly stupid Americans are.
You are either stupid or lying, I believe lying. I say this because in each of your substantive attacks, you blatantly misstate facts, even obvious ones.gotmituns , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 10:12 am GMTPersonally I am honestly and eyes open clinging to the hope that Trump is sincerely doing his best for us, because the alternative is civil war, and if it comes to that, it will come to that. Trump is the last possible peaceful salvation for America.
Here are your lies, which tell me you are not genuine:
> He has refurbished the George W. Bush era fence. Since he has been president, Donald Trump has built all of three new miles of fence,A blatant and obvious lie to anyone who is tracking the wall progress "refurbished" means replaced completely ineffective fence, including vehicle barriers which you can literally walk around, with 18-30ft high steel fence. You may jerk off to the technicality that it isn't "new", but we all see through you. Over 100 miles so far with 350 more planned, and he has done it with congress kicking and screaming. He even diverted defense spending for this purpose, against all of Washington's whining and complaining. These are the actions of someone who is sincere.
>there have been no cuts to legal immigration
Bull shit. Blatant lie. 2017 saw a 10% decrease in net migration from 1046 million to 930 million. 2018 down another 25% to 700 million, and 2019 15% to 600 million. That's God damn good work for a man with an entire bureaucracy and 2 parties fighting him. He didn't even get a law to sign and he still cut legal immigration by almost HALF. I can hardly believe it myself it's too good to be true. Why lie?
>Donald Trump hasn't even deported as many illegal aliens as Obama.
You know as well as I do that Obama changed the reporting of deportations to include 'voluntary returns'. Obama deported virtually no one from the interior. Regardless, more importantly, we both know how aggressively both parties and the bureaucracy have fought to prevent Trump from taking action, and yet against all odds he secured agreements with Honduras El Salvador and Guatemala to deport "Asylum seekers" there, making an end run around the legal labyrinth that was keeping them here. That is HUGE and you completely omit it.
You also omitted
Starting a trade war with China
Supporting the break up of the EU
Demanding funds from allies under our umbrella
Not starting a war in Syria or Iran, both of which they desperately tried to force him intoBut most of all, you ignored the fact that the entire intelligence apparatus, the entire media, the entire establishment has sacrificed their credibility in the attack on Trump.
That is the main reason I still have hope. Your lies bald face lies are why I do not believe you are sincere.
I love it that the jew and the fag won in Iowa. Of course, I don't love that Trump will probably win in Nov. but the options to him are dismal to say the least. No matter what, once he's out of office the days of this "republic"/empire are surely numbered.Tom Welsh , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 10:28 am GMTI disagree that voting for Mr Trump was a mistake. American elections are always a choice of evils, but in this case it was more a choice between rapid extinction of our species and run-of-the-mill evil, killing only the odd million people now and then.Tom Welsh , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 10:31 am GMTI personally take this cartoon very seriously indeed:
If Hillary Clinton had become President, I believe she would have found a way to start a war with Russia. And that would have resulted in the death of all human beings, plus many other species.
Mr Trump is execrable, it is true. But he has one enormous virtue: for whatever reason, he is extremely open and candid. Whereas US presidents going back to the 19th century did frightful things while smiling genially and pretending to be kind, Mr Trump openly admits how frightful he and his deeds are.
That is hastening the demise of the US empire, which is in the interests of all human beings.
@MattinLA There are certainly no easy choices. As a foreigner I am hardly in a position to criticize, let alone to encourage US citizens. But perhaps I could remind you of an early President during whose 8 years in power not a single American or foreigner was killed by the US government?anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 10:36 am GMT"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure".
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787), quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy
@MattinLA IOW, you're going to vote again? For Mr. Trump?Esoteric Schuonian , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 11:16 am GMT"In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.
A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics."
Linh Dinh, "Orlando Shooting Means Trump for President," June 12, 2016, @ The Unz Review.
All the system needs is for you to pick Red or Blue, accepting the results until the next Most Important Election Ever.
As a first time voter in 2016, Trump's relative inaction on all that he promised has made me more aware than ever of the rot that has set in our political system. I was skeptical that political change could be accomplished prior to 2016 but optimistic. Now I cannot be anymore pessimistic about the future.anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 11:35 am GMT@Chet Roman " another conservative judge on the Supreme Court; a change that will impact the next 30+ years. That alone will be enough for me."WorkingClass , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 11:36 am GMTYeah, Right.
Like the impact of all the Republican appointees who issued the ruling in Roe v Wade?
Like the impact of Mr. Kennedy, a Republican choice who helped rewrite the legal definition of marriage?
Like the impact of Mr. Roberts, a Republican choice who nailed down Big Sickness for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries?
What impact do you honestly expect from Mr. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump's choice who earned his first robe by helping President Cheney with the Patriot Act?
Like the "federal" elections held every November in even-numbered years and the 5-4 decrees of the Court, the partisan judicial nominations and nailbiting confirmation hearings are another part of the RedBlue puppet show that keeps people like Chet Roman voting in the next Most Important Election Ever.
Your disappointment is the inverse of your expectations. Perhaps you should curb your enthusiasm? So what's next? Join the Communists? Boycott the system? That will teach them! Trump is the best looking horse in the glue factory. Do you see a candidate you like better?Sunshine State , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 11:36 am GMTSpeak for yourself chump.
As Ronald Reagan once noted, the public has once again come to realize there is not much difference between the Party's.Craig Nelsen , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 11:49 am GMTThe effort to remove Trump from office began before he was even sworn in. In terms of intensity the effort has been unlike anything any of us have ever seen. And that effort has come relentlessly, from all sides. The media, the late night comics, the intelligence services, the kritarchy, the bureaucracy they have been united in thwarting Trump's every move, united in flogging an entirely bogus Russian collusion investigation from his first day in office. And they IMPEACHED the man over nonsense, for crying out loud.Just passing through , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 11:53 am GMTThe most powerful elements in this country have thrown, and continue to throw, everything they've got at him. They have brought this country to the brink of a cataclysm for their hatred of Donald Trump and their overriding desire to see him removed from power and his voters punished. Their hatred alone is reason enough to continue to support Trump.
It was a miracle Donald Trump won the presidency. It is a miracle he is still in office. And a miracle is the only thing that can save us.
Do you not remember how utterly hopeless things seemed in 2015? How completely we'd been beaten? There was zero chance the immigration tide could be stopped, for one thing. Do you not realize that it is a miracle that things are slightly less hopeless now? A miracle that, in 2020, we aren't beaten quite so completely? That, by some miracle, the chance of achieving an immigration time-out within the next four years is now greater than zero?
Any Trump supporter who turns on Trump because he disapproves of the job Trump has done as president just shows his own fractiousness, because, in truth, Trump has not yet had a chance to be president. And politically, turning on Trump is particularly boneheaded given there is absolutely no alternative and we are out of miracles.
@Divine Right The GOP donors would never allow a fully-fledged White populist candidate to slip through the net, Trump was never such a thing which is why he managed to win the primaries.BuelahMan , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 11:59 am GMTBy the time the boomers die off, it will be too late and even a White Rights candidate would never won as the demographics will have shifted so much, and this is assuming Whites start skewing towards GOP on the same way Blacks skew towards Democrats. In reality the younger Whites still have the virus of individuality in their minds, thinking that politics is about high-minded ideas instead of group interests.
Poor Brad. I spent all that same time trying desperately to show you how far off you were in the support of an obvious jew water carrier. Twitter (until they dumped me) and then even signing up for your blog.John Chuckman , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:00 pm GMTI left comment after comment with valuable information, obvious and thorough.
You ignored it all, even in the face of its blatant OBVIOUSNESS. You were a Drumpfter and with Trump saying just the right thing, you could probably go back.
It is why I left your site and won't go back. You spent years being totally WRONG.
Reading this is like reading the words of a guilty man who was too stupid to see what was truly right in front of your face. Or one that knew all along but had a different agenda.
Either way, you have zero credibility or discernment when it comes to politics, so why don't you just keep it to yourself.
Me, a dumb ole redneck, called it in Aug 2015 and didn't stop trying to warn the world of this OBVIOUSNESS. You know it and I know it.
Some strong points here, not all of them, but a number.BuelahMan , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:00 pm GMT"He has been a disappointment on all fronts."
No statement could be more accurate.
Trump is a failure, but one with a very loud mouth and a rather twisted psychology that magically converts all failures into successes. Nothing factual ever fazes him.
And the ability to just keep going is a great asset in politics, even if it means you keep going to do destructive things. You actions communicate strength and purpose and determination to ordinary people.
After all, much of the ordinary public literally has no idea what is going on, abroad or at home, so poorly informed are they by the mainline press and the political establishment.
He does a daily war dance of self-praise, finding new phrases to whoop and chant, describing his almost complete failure in the opposite terms.
But because he is doing overall the power establishment's work against China, against Iran, against Russia, for Israel, and in Latin America they not only do not oppose him, they support him.
He does his work rudely and utterly without grace.
He is a man who wears his ignorance as though it were a finely-tailored suit.
But the power establishment is okay with the grotesque style, so long as they get the results they want. And they do.
The desired results are mainly negative, not positive, achievements.
But that is the essence of imperial America today, to do harm to others in order to improve its own relative standing. It does almost nothing positive anymore anywhere. It threatens friends and foes alike. It destroys international organizations and order. It supports the creation of chaos, as in Syria or Libya or Yemen.
The contrast of America's now-constant threats and hostilities with China's great Belt and Rail Initiative couldn't be starker. Or with Putin's pragmatic "live and let live" philosophy. We see destruction versus creation. Coercion versus cooperation. Ignorance versus information. Darkness versus light.
So, Trump, with all of grotesqueries and lies, provides almost the perfect President.
Sorry, America, but that is a very great, if ugly, truth.
@Tom Welsh The lesser of two evils is a sad, twisted and failed idea. Learn a new one.BuelahMan , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:03 pm GMT@George Lincoln Let's not forget that he is totally and completely surrounded and controlled by Chabad jews.Iraq Veteran , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:08 pm GMTGood thing, right?
That his every move is something for jews?
That's GOOD, right?
I despise Drumpfters.
@Priss Factor You are so right!geokat62 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:14 pm GMTonebornfree , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:20 pm GMTThey wear Q shirts
Only until they start wearing JQ shirts will there be hope.
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy .Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies." Carroll QuigleyRobert Dolan , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:22 pm GMTAnd so it goes ..at least until enough people start to understand/believe that the government is their enemy, never their friend , and that a completely unlimited government [i.e. what we currently endure], regardless of who is president, will continue to take more of their money and freedom away on a daily basis because:
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
Regards, onebornfree
Sadly, it doesn't matter who we vote for as the jewing will continue unabated.Rusty nail , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:23 pm GMTProof of this is to always ask, "Who benefits?"
And the answer is ALWAYS the jews, and the answer is NEVER white people.
Once you understand what the jews want, what their interests are, and you see that everything that happens seems to be good for the jews, you realize that this awful system is anti-white to the core and it's been engineered by the nose for the nose. There is no other way to explain the fact that the interests of white people are NEVER honored. In fact, the interests of white people are not even given a passing thought.
It's really quite remarkable. And totally insane.
I knew it was going south in a hurry when he moved into the white house and turned it into something resembling a synagogue.zard , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:24 pm GMTAs an outsider, watching media reporting on American politics, I find myself wondering if I'm not actually viewing Israeli political news. How do Americans not notice this?
Trump's supposed conflict with congress to get funding for the border wall is just a kosher psyop designed to give off the illusion that he is fighting to uphold his campaign promises, when in reality he's just carrying out the jews white genocidal program. He's no different than Obama. Black or white, they take orders from the same political class: the Jews who control the money, the policies, and the media.Moi , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:57 pm GMTBut what's most sickening about all this is that the same congress that unanimously votes to give untold billions to Israel in foreign military aid is now telling the American people that there is just not enough money to fund a border wall ! Israel first, America last, that's how congress works.
Why don't the Jews want a strong US border wall built ? Because the JEWS want to genocide White Christian Americans through mass illegal immigration. Why ? Because non-white third world people have lower-iq's and are easier for the Jews to control and make slaves out of.
( Destabilizing society for political gains- Offering stupid people free everything will always get votes, and they know this. )Funding for the US border wall could be solved overnight by removing Jewish control over the monetary system and cancelling all foreign aid to Israel, but don't except that to happen anytime soon. Nothing has changed since Trump has become president and nothing will. Illegal immigration, poverty, unemployment and wars will accelerate under Trump because those are the natural consequences of following the orders of America hating Jews. Trump isn't playing some 4d chess strategy and all those who still say this are blind, deaf and dumb. The Jews are still in full control of the Federal Reserve and by extension the media, government, courts, law enforcement, education etc. Stop living in a fantasy land and face the facts.
As it was with Bush,Clinton and Obama, the United States is still a vassal state of Israel and controlled by the Jews. We cannot vote ourselves out of this situation. Democracy means Jewish control that breaks down to which political candidate gets the most jewish money and jewish media coverage. The Jews pick our presidents, it doesn't matter if a republican or democrat gets elected, each party is only concerned with advancing the Jewish world government agenda.
@Priss Factor Regarding Gen. Soleimani, a true martyr, you should have seen how insultingly the moronic ABC World News anchor David Muir brought up the name of Gen. Soleimani at last night's DNC debate. And none of the candidates bothered to correct Muir.Moi , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:59 pm GMT@Gleimhart Mantooso Keep wallowing in hate and ignorance. Muslims are the only people outside of Christians who revere Jesus, albeit not as god jr. but as as a mighty prophet.Moi , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:01 pm GMT@Peter Akuleyev The man is lout!I'm Not Laughing , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMTFor sure, Trump has been less than impressive on all fronts. At least he hasn't committed the US to an all-out war with Iran, but I strongly suspect he will do so after he is re-elected.Anonymous [346] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMTAs far as actual unemployment, January 2020 remains at a stable 21% and all the bs about 3.5% is the usual smoke-and-mirrors:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
I think the establishment is once again giving the American voter no real alternatives (but isn't that the point?). Do you want Trump or a Jewish communist, Trump or Indiana's little Peewee Buttfudge? Whatever. The final result will always be "X" is president in a White House filled with zionists. Everything American crumbles while the Israelis continue the dance they started on 9/11.
Machiavelli wrote that the best people to take power are not the best people to run the government. The implication is precisely that: use the chumps and then discard them.Sam J. , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:19 pm GMTDespite all the technology, some things haven't changed.
@Divine Right " My read of the situation is that Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the general election, despite the confident predictions of an incoming Trumpslide by deluded supporters. In his defeat, he'll take the last vestiges of Reagan conservatism down with him "Sam J. , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:32 pm GMTYour comment is very interesting. While I didn't like it emotionally. Intellectually it was excellent.
I have all of the same complaints as Brad Griffin. I have to admit my perfidy as I have at times believed in Q and other times I haven't. Right now I'm at the, we'll see, stage as I have no idea what is going to happen and if he so wished Trump could fall on the deep State like a bear trap. If he is going to do this then the delay til he can get in a more honest set of judges and push out some the worst of the actors makes sense. Even his wishy washy staffing the place to the gills with Jews and inconsistent policies. He has several times stated positions and done things that have put his enemies in very awkward positions that are difficult to weasel out of. He could still take down portions of the deep State. We'll have to see but I admit it doesn't look good.
Former CIA head William Casey once said, and it is verified, something like that when no one knows what the truth is the CIA had done it's job. I think we are at that stage now.
If Trump does not reign in the deep State, meaning the Jews for all practical purposes, or even if he loses the election I suspect strongly that a vast tsunami of Whites will instantly lose faith in government. I think it likely that if Trump loses it will be a psychic shock.
If Trump has no plan to take on the deep State and Q is just a deep State actor to delay the day of reckoning I hope Trump does lose.
There's a path, a very scary one, that may be what Q is all about if he is a deep State actor. Computer power has continued to increase combined with neural nets computing. The time line for a $1,000 computer chip with the computing power of a human is 2025. It may be off by a little but it will happen. If when this happens and the Jews are still in control they could, combined with 5G, build what ever robot army they wished for around 10 or 20 thousand dollars a piece and murder us all. Elon Musk global network in space would also allow them global dominance. I've always been suspicious of Elon being a Jew while supporting what he is doing as being good for the country. When he immigrated to Canada from South Africa he first had a job at a bank supposedly with one of this relatives. He also has been extremely capable in raising vast sums of capital. Jews are much more able to do this due to nepotism. He denies being a Jew.
@NPleeze " Nobody has harmed the conservative cause more than the Orange Satan ."Johnny Walker Read , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:45 pm GMTNobody has harmed the FAKE JEW conservative cause more than the Orange Satan.
Fixed it for you.
Trump is very much a chump and a liar, as pretty much every president has been from the beginning. This will include supposed great presidents like Lincoln, Wilson, Teddy and FD Roosevelt, Reagan, Obama, and yes, even the vaunted JFK.KenH , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:47 pm GMTThe problem is and always has been "Murkans" find themselves a political party and basically sign up for life. They never seem to learn no matter who is put into office, the slow slide to a full blown Marxist type Oligarchy marches on. I cannot fathom why people go to political rallies and wave and cheer for known liars and charlatans, hanging on their every promise as if it came from God himself.
Nothing is ever going to change in this country until the corporate money is eliminated from politics, until lobbying for political favors is made illegal, until BOTH corrupt political parties currently running America are shown the ash heap of history, AND until people realize there is more politics than marking a ballot.
This country will only be made well when the citizens start attending city, county, and state government meetings and demand the constitution be upheld. Without our involvement at every level of government, it is easy for the shysters and crooks to grow fat through graft and corruption.
The choice is ours and ours alone, but if history is any indicator of what will be, I say we be in deep shit.
@George LincolnJohnny Walker Read , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:53 pm GMTBull shit. Blatant lie. 2017 saw a 10% decrease in net migration from 1046 million to 930 million. 2018 down another 25% to 700 million, and 2019 15% to 600 million. That's God damn good work for a man with an entire bureaucracy and 2 parties fighting him
Where's the link for this claim? At the 2019 SOTU Trump bragged that immigrants would be coming to the USA in "the largest numbers ever" under his administration.
Candidate Trump vowed to end H1B visas but president Trump now supports expanding the program. Candidate Trump vowed to deport Dreamers and all other illegal aliens. Candidate Trump says he'll work with Congress to allow Dreamers to stay in the U.S. and avoid deportation.
But most of all, you ignored the fact that the entire intelligence apparatus, the entire media, the entire establishment has sacrificed their credibility in the attack on Trump.
Outside of a few of exceptions like Comey, Strzok and McCabe there's been almost no consequences for any crazy leftists or deep state operatives for attacking Trump. At most, some (((MSM))) talking heads have suffered decreased viewership, but that hasn't slowed them down one iota while the FBI has viciously retaliated against high profile Trump supporters like Mike Flynn and Roger Stone.
I thought Trump was going to go after Hillary if elected and "lock her up?" That was just one of his many lies and dog whistles.
More on "Pete the Cheat" Buttigieg, not the harmless little rump ranger mayor you have been led to believe he is.Truth3 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:13 pm GMT
https://www.winterwatch.net/2020/02/mayor-pete-the-spook-a-favorite-of-the-kakistocracy-and-parasite-guild/Yes, Trump is an idiot I know well. I spent a day with him.fool's paradise , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:17 pm GMTThe real problem has been, when we have a candidate that would be good for America, the Jews and the Jewish controlled media destroy him, and the people do not react appropriately.
Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader all offered their talents for the job. See what happened?
Trump is not the problem. He's the symptom.
Go after the root.
Gerhard Menuhin understood this well enough he named his book accordingly.
Because life is relatively short, the people adapt a "go along to get along" mentality. They fear losing their rice bowl (job) so they act like coolies (slaves).
People need to change the essential failing thinking only of themselves.
Better to be a martyr once than a slave 10,000 times.
Since both parties are hopelessly corrupt enemies of the people, I vote third party if I can, so I didn't vote for Trump but I was glad he beat Hillary, because Hillary was a known evil, and Trump? I liked his campaign promises, to make friends with Russia, to get out of NATO, to stop the "stupid" Mideast wars, to echo Lindbergh by his motto "America First", which promised a kind of paleo-conservative "isolationism", i.e., stay home, mind our own business, stop policing the world with regime-change wars. I wrote off his Border Fence as unworkable. And he started off well. He called most TV news Fake News. He said Media was "the enemy of the people". Wow! What other politician told such a truth? He met with Putin in Helsinki and believed Putin's word over his own "Intelligence", and Wow!, again. But it didn't last. His enemies were after him (Russia! Russia! Russia!) from Day One, and after the Putin meeting FBI and CIA and Media all called him a TRAITOR! Media bad-mouthed him 24/7 for months, and I believe Trump finally caved, joined our enemies in the Swamp he had promised to drain, because he didn't have the balls to stand up to the constant, unrelenting pressure on him. His first choices for Secty of State,of Defense, were okay, but then he hired the awful Bolton and then the noxious Pompeo, he surrounded himself with the loyal-to-Israel Neocons, and now Netanyahu is our President, not Trump.remington , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:24 pm GMTSo he has become just another enemy of the people. If Bernie is screwed out of the Dem nomination, as he was last time, I hope he starts a Third Party, with Ron Paul as his Vice, and Tulsi Gabbard as Secty of State.
inclined to agree. perhaps q-anon is part of this charade?ken , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:29 pm GMT@Gizmo880 Add to that, who would champion any of these changes in either chamber of Congress? This article perfectly reflects the adolescent whining that permeates the unz site that everything is not going exactly as I want.bjondo , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:39 pm GMTReally No Shit , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:40 pm GMThttps://www.youtube.com/embed/_wMntDFfAhQ?feature=oembed
https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/02/07/tucker-carlson-sounds-the-alert/
5ds
You deserve to be drunk on the junk offered by the Drumpf a narcissistic hedonist from Manhattan in real estate business (where 9 out of 10 largest real estate enterprises are owned by Jews), who was desperate at times to hold on to that thing which is most dear to him, the title of unmitigated billionaire, and which could not be hold on to without the blessings of the Central Park "rabbis" and one who had married non-native white women of dubious origin (possibly Jewish), at least 2 out of 3 times and a man who wasn't known for his christian (assuming he is one) piety or charity was suddenly the savior of the White nationalists.Glock45 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:49 pm GMTYou're right about one thing: give a drowning (White nationalist) man enough rope and he will hang himself!
@nsa Trumpstein actually did something about the H1B visa program .he increased it claiming we need more of these half priced "brainiacs". Can't find enough discount American code scribblers, you know.MLK , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:51 pm GMTBingo.
BTW, back in the mid 00s when I had certifications in C# programming and SQL, my phone was literally ringing off the hook with job offers and I never went more than 1 week without a contract job. In the following years working for a large company in the industry, I gained even more experience in other things in IT that interested me such as machine learning, parallel programming and cloud computing.
When that company went south in 2016 I lost my job. Furiously searching for a job, it took NINE months before I landed another. When I talked with all the local head-hunting contractor firms and IT placement companies, they all told me the same story: all the local companies are pretty much only hiring H1B's now in their IT departments.
Absolutely disgusting.
That along with many other things that I've seen since 2016 have convinced me that my children have no future here in this shithole country.
Glock45 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:58 pm GMTIn the final two years of the Obama administration (2015 and 2016), the Alt-Right was thriving on social media and was brimming with energy.
Yes, in service to Hillary and the Democrats. Not all who called themselves alt-right, but beyond question it was a "movement" that was and still is wholly compromised. I know it's hard for you to hear, and despite whatever else he peddled, Freud was on to something when it came to Projection.
It doesn't surprise me that this author has memory-holed his movement's high water mark -- Hillary's alt-right speech. Throughout the 2016 campaign, while little went Hillary's way, she consistently drew royal straight flushes, with David Duke, Richard Spencer and various other agents-provocateur, going on CNN and MSNBC declaring their support for Trump.
Here's your buddy Richard Spencer days after Trump won the election:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/1o6-bi3jlxk?feature=oembed
A word to the wise, anyone who didn't know to whom this character belongs, and long before this moment, should assiduously avoid the word 'chump.'
I won't paint with a broad brush. To the extent that anyone cares, it was and remains rather easy to figure out which in the so-called alt-right can't be trusted. Whether because the FBI or someone else has them by the short-hairs, or they're Leninist/Stalinist filth doing their part for the cause.
That includes those writing articles like this, lamenting that Trump betrayed you after you voted for him by being a great president for African Americans too.
Timing is rarely coincidental. Thus this jibber jabber comes just after Trump defeated the latest coup attempt and even Democrat allied-media is finally forced to begin to concede that he'll win reelection.
Trump will do so with historic support from blacks and Hispanics (for a Republican). Which is why Democrats and their allied-media are again feverishly pushing their "white nationalist" button again.
Meh, c'mon guys.Ragno , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:58 pm GMTAny day now the "GOD EMPEROR (!!!)" is going to "UNLEASH THE STORM!!!"
Oh, yeah, sure some Jews get beat up in midtown Manhattan and Trump swings into action quicker than whale shit thru an ice floe passing EOs that end up practically paving the way to make it illegal to criticize Jews
Um, OK he sure was quick and decisive for them.
But surely he will get around to doing something for the goys too!!!
Just wait and "trust the plan!"
Moi , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:58 pm GMTThe reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were immigration, trade, foreign policy, political correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas of "nationalism" and "populism."
Well then you are a chump. The only tactical reason to have voted for Trump was to deny Hillary Clinton executive power . That was the sole reason any conservative or rightist had to participate in Our National Sham. To believe that he was going to reintroduce "nigger" to the national lexicon by 2018 was head-in-the-clouds foolishness.
Thwarting Soros/Hillary remains his major contribution* to American politics: under Trump, the masks on the other side have all come off. There is no longer any subterfuge about the Unholy Trinity of the Far Left, meaning the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and the hostage institutions such as academia and local/state government. The rabid doubling-down of the anti-white Deep State unthinkable with a nabob like McConnell or Romney in the Oval Office is another plus to the Trump Administration: what the talking heads all nervously refer to as the "deep divisions" in our country is one of the few signs of mental health and vitality America has experienced in a half-century's worth of decline.
Nobody was going to reverse that half-century in three or four years it was a physical impossibility; just as no one was going to pry off Team Shmuel's death-grip without at least pretending not to. Ten years would be insufficient for such tasks. But it doesn't mean you petulantly vow to starve yourself because half a loaf is an insult.
*= it's rarely brought up but his quietly appointing centrist/conservative judges to the bench, boring as it may seem to tiki-torch revolutionaries, still represents an important step in the right direction and is probably his second major contribution to the struggle,
@Father O'Hara Perfect!MikeatMikedotMike , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:04 pm GMT@BuelahMan For example?Desert Fox , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:05 pm GMTTrump is the reincarnation of the Roman emperor Caligula and the present government of the ZUS is a reincarnation of the later days of the Roman empire, in every way!MikeatMikedotMike , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:06 pm GMT@I'm Not Laughing Pool's closed.Anonymous [137] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:07 pm GMTGreat article, and the most depressing one I've read in a long time.KA , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:17 pm GMT@MattinLA America has faced problem like this in the past It will solve the problem in similar or identical terms . Thats what it does It provides a ruse . Now the ruse is not covering the corners of the lying lips even before next set of problems emerge straight from the solution.Anon [398] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:18 pm GMTI agree with the Jew in hating Christ.Niebelheim , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:19 pm GMTI am gainfully employed by the FBI.
I eat ranch dressing on every meal.
I AM A PROUD WHITE NATIONALIST!
Trump isn't a god and there's so much to criticize about his track record, all true. But at minimum, Trump did delay the socialist takeover of the federal judiciary. As disgusting as his kowtowing has been of the neocons that control the Deep State, the invasion of Iran has still yet to materialize. How would a Hillary presidency have fared with Scalia's replacement and a no-fly zone over Syria? Good bye First and Second Amendment. The alternative to Trump is grim.KA , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:20 pm GMT@Sam J. FAKE JEW conservativeTrinity , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMTHe has not harmed the FAKE He has not harmed the JEW
He might have harmed some conservatives But they are not neoconservatives.
@Tom Welsh As bad as Trumpstein is, and make no mistake, the cuckold for Coco-Zionists is bad, Clinton and company would have been even worse. In 2020 we have anti-White demsheviks like Butt-Plug, the first openly homosexual candidate for Prez, Warren, Biden and flat out commie Jew, Sanders, and Jew Bloomberg. I guess the Jew is ready to come out of the shadows and openly run for Prez just like homosexual Butt-Plug. Of course it could be said that we have a Jew as POTUS right now, President Baby Nut&Yahoo and his VP Jared Kushner.WJ , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:23 pm GMTThe biggest thing Trumpstein has done as Prez is expose how fake the Jew media is, but lets not kid ourselves, with the exception of Tucker Carlson ( even Tucker doesn't tell the total truth and he won't touch the JQ) even the neocons at FOX and OAN don't tell the complete truth, and sometimes they do more harm by telling 90% truth and 10% lies than commie anti-White networks like CNN, MSNBC and all the rest.
Trumpstein is a native New Yorker, what did you really expect?? The guy has been around criminal Jews all his life, he has Jew lawyers, his daughter has converted to Judaism and she married an orthodox Jew. As bad as our past Presidents were, some claim LBJ, FDR, and even Eisenhower might have been Jews or had Jewish blood flowing through their shabbos goy veins, Trump might be the biggest cuckold yet when it comes to the biggest shabbos goy Prez of all time.
Until a UNITED STATES PRESIDENT OR OFFICIAL GOES AFTER GEORGE SOROS AND THE LIKE AND SERIOUSLY SEEKS TO IMPRISON HIM AND OTHERS FOR FLOODING OUR COUNTRY WITH ILLEGAL INVADERS, WE DON'T HAVE A LEGIT PRESIDENT.
Do you think Hitler would have stood by and allowed non-Germans or traitorous Germans to flood Germany with Turks or Pakis and then went out and told throngs of people how he is keeping Germany first? Come on, man. Trump is better than the alternative, BUT the new boss isn't much different than the old boss. Just another cuckold influenced by his Jewish masters and Jewish money.
@Priss Factor It's amusing to read the rabid Trump haters on the right. They have a better option?Charles Pewitt , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:23 pm GMTSome of the Trump haters say we should just let the whole thing burn down and that Trump is controlled opposition delaying the inevitable and preferred civil war. These are people that won't give up their Netflix, won't give up whatever outlet Game of Thrones is on and won't even put down their IPhone. It's absurd.
It's always about horrible vs less horrible.
Trump is a fat-assed, baby boomer politician whore for the evil and immoral globalizer treasonites in the JEW/WASP ruling class of the American Empire.WJ , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:24 pm GMTTrump has been screaming like a three dollar whore politician about flooding the USA with mass legal immigration "in the largest numbers ever."
Trump has refused to deport the upwards of 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA.
Trump has kept the American Empire garrisons and bases forward deployed and stuck in muck hole regions of the globe.
Trump has put the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of the American Empire.
Trump is a bought and paid for three dollar whore politician for Jew billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul Singer and Bernie Marcus and other billionaire bastards.
Trump has kept his fat mouth shut about the Fed-created and monetary policy induced asset bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate. In 2016, fat ass baby boomer bastard Trumpy was calling these same damn asset bubbles nothing but "fat, ugly bubbles." In 2016 Trump said "we are in a big, fat, ugly bubble" and the asset bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are only bigger and uglier and fatter now.
I hereby challenge baby boomer fat ass Trumpy -- and Teddy Cruz, Marco Rubio, Dan Crenshaw, Tom Cotton and any other GOP puke who wants to show up -- to a debate on mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration, tax policy, trade policy, foreign policy, monetary policy, American national identity, multicultural mayhem, White Genocide and any other damn thing.
Vote for CHARLES PEWITT as a Write-In candidate for president in New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and every other state presidential primary.
Charles Pewitt Immigration Pledge:
IMMIGRATION MORATORIUM NOW!
DEPORT ALL ILLEGAL ALIEN INVADERS NOW!
REMOVE THE FOREIGNERS NOW!
REMOVE ALL WHITES OR OTHERS THAT ARE HOSTILE TO THE EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN ANCESTRAL CORE OF THE USA
Ban The Bat Soup Fever People Now!
The Charles Pewitt write-in campaign for president of the USA has called for the immediate implementation of a BAT SOUP FEVER BAN which will quarantine the rest of the world, including Canada and Mexico. All foreigners currently occupying US territory will be immediately removed and they will be put on barges with baloney sandwiches for sustenance on their long voyage back to wherever the Hell they came from. Those who have deliberately shredded their identification -- like Pelosi shredding Trumpy's speech -- shall be put in a baloney sandwich camp in sub-Saharan Africa and kept there indefinitely.
The Charles Pewitt write-in campaign for president has stated numerous times that open borders mass legal immigration and open borders mass illegal immigration brings infectious diseases to the USA and this new fangled BAT SOUP FEVER is just EBOLA with more sniffles and the walking pneumonia and the boogie woogie bat soup fever blues.
The Charles Pewitt ban on the Bat Soup Fever People, plus all the other foreigners for good measure, will bring massive benefits to the American people.
The Charles Pewitt ban on all foreigners in combination with a massive removal of all foreigners in the USA will boost wages, lower housing costs, reduce income inequality, lower class sizes, protect the environment, restore cultural cohesion, give US workers more bargaining power, reduce belly fat, reduce commuting times, provide relief for overwhelmed hospitals and be good for regular Americans and bad for globalizer banker money-grubbing nasty people.
The Charles Pewitt presidency will extinguish all student loan debt and pay back all student loan debt ever paid plus 6 percent interest accrued yearly.
The Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion will grant each American citizen with all blood ancestors born in colonial America or in the USA before 1924 the sum of ten thousand dollars a month -- tax free.
The Pewitt Tax Pledge will abolish the payroll tax and reduce federal income taxes substantially for all Americans making below 300, 000 dollars a year. Billionaires will be declared illegal and they will be financially liquidated and the federal corporate tax rate shall be 80 percent and 100 percent for all corporations that have gone offshore.
God Bless America And Ban The Bat Soup Fever People Now!
Write In CHARLES PEWITT For President On Your Ballot -- God Bless The USA!
@MattinLA Clinton /Kaine promised up comprehensive amnesty in the first one hundred days of their administration. Did we get that under Trump?Turk 152 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:31 pm GMT@Divine Right If the Democrats have Pete steal the nominatin, then you can be sure they want to give Trump the election. I dont think they control Bliombverg, more likely, he controls them so I would call him a wild card. Sanders would win the election, but as you can see in Iowa, the criminals running the DNC, aka Hillary, are a much bigger threat to him then Trump.RadicalCenter , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:36 pm GMT@Father O'Hara Proper response would have been a kick in the balls and "you ARE a Fat Jewish dick."Trinity , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:38 pm GMT@Charles Pewitt And you actually think that guy has a legit shot at winning? And you actually think he will be able to keep all of his promises? The more I learn about what Hitler had to overcome to become Chancellor of Germany, you realize that men like Hitler are rare and only come along once every couple hundreds of years. And Germany wasn't mixed with every kind of brown and yellow race under the Sun either, America is a different animal altogether. I am not sure if even a man like Hitler could turn America around in 2020. It will take A LOT OF WORK TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, odds are unless we do a 180% turn, America is going out with a whimper and sooner rather than later.RadicalCenter , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:41 pm GMT@alex in San Jose AKA Digital Detroit Net immigration has definitely NOT been outward. Both legal and illegal migration into the USA are still massive, larger than the outflow from all appearances. The net result, and this is without reference to the race or color or religion of the wave of immigrants:eah , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:42 pm GMTa more crowded, more polluted, more expensive, less trusting society where tens of millions of people cannot communicate effectively with each other in English and US citizens whose families have been here for generations or even a couple centuries have a harder and harder time finding full-time jobs with decent pay, benefits, and HAHA a pension.
@Chet Roman After the last 3 years of seditious behavior of lying politicians like Schiff , Nadler and Pelosi and the traitorous schemes of deep state actors like Weismann, Vindman, Sondland and YovanovitchZ-man , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:50 pm GMT(That would be Andrew Weis s mann.)
See JEW COUP: SEDITIOUS JEWS ORCHESTRATING TRUMP IMPEACHMENT LYNCHING
Trump will continue to kiss Jew ass though -- and don't forget: the Democrats are the real anti-Semites.
While I agree with your main point, what are you going to do? Vote for lil' Mike Bloomberg? Mayor Pete? LOL. These clowns are completely controlled. Yes this system has boxed us in but Trump at least gives the illusion of revolt, and he still isn't 100% controlled, only 99%.(Grin) Others will have to pick up the mantle of revolt against the 'Deep State' when he is gone.Meena , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:51 pm GMT
For the time being thankfully Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul and other America First types will be pushing Trump to follow his campaign promises, however little he actually does. Because the alternative, Biden, Bloomberg, the mayor Pete & company, is considerably worse.The main strikes against Trump are 1. His even more fawning than anticipated towards the Zionist beast. But most of that was predictable however regrettable. 2. His acquiescence to the Republi'tard tax cuts which has only benefited the rich. The Republicans lost big in the mid terms because of those cuts but 'lo and behold' Trump was still there. 3. All the other shit-lib policies that Trump ignored or even supported, like increases in 'legal' immigration. That's the fault of his dopey daughter and her weird Zionist/Orthodox Jew husband. With the son-in-law's one sided 'Deal of the Century' falling flat on its face, hopefully this will hasten the moving of said weird son-in-law and dopey daughter back to NYC 'one'. Then hopefully Trump will turn to advice from the likes of Carlson and Paul who will appeal to his inner America First soul.
@Ragno Thwarting Soros/Hillary remains his major contribution* to American politics: under Trump, the masks on the other side have all ""Trinity , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 4:03 pm GMTHow has he exactly ?
Soros and Hillary occupy certain positions . Now they are gone but taken over by some other guys and gals .
It's a job . New employees still haven't been awarded the best employee award yet . That will come at the retirement for the next set of people to carry on with the same anonymity.We all know PNAC. How many will bother to know what the new letter head organizations the same crazy bunch are heading now with new faces ?
Whether it is the openly anti-White demshevik candidate who wins or Trump, it is a win-win for the Jew. And our demshevik buddies have already hinted at locking up any White who might have the temerity to whine about his or her countries being flooded with browns, yellows and other hues of hostile third world biological weapons of mass destruction or God any White who blasphemes the self avowed "masters of the universe" who control America's media, much of our judicial system, and apparently own all of our serious candidates for POTUS should face imprisonment according to some of these certifiable cuckold nutjobs. As I commented earlier, Hitler wasn't some mentally disturbed madman who munched on carpet when enraged, he was a brilliant and brave man, but even Hitler didn't have to overcome the odds that anyone elected as the American President has to overcome. The Jewish dream of making America a polyglot of every kind of race under the sun with more colors than a rainbow has become true. Hitler only had the Jew to worry about for the most part, while the American President has to tackle not only Jewish power and influence, he has a country full of Chinese, Arabs, East Indians, Africans, Hispanics of all sorts, just your common everyday African American with a chip on his shoulder the size of a boulder, and all other assorted groups of malcontents demanding handouts while at the same time cursing our nation and thinking Whitey owes them something for nothing.Agent76 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 4:05 pm GMTSlavery is alive and well for those who cannot thier chains.Charles Pewitt , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 4:07 pm GMTJul 22, 2009 Speaker Pelosi on Restoring Pay-As-You-Go Budget
Discipline Today, the House passed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act 2009 (HR 2920) by a vote of 265-166.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jmiU_C2UEdM?feature=oembed
Jan 20, 2017 Here's how much debt the US government added under President Obama
Based on quarterly data released by the US Treasury, the debt at the end of 2008 just before Obama took office stood at roughly $10,699,805,000,000. As of the third quarter of 2016, the most recent data available, the debt as Obama is set to leave office stood at $19,573,445,000,000.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/national-debt-deficit-added-under-president-barack-obama-2017-1
@Trinity The USA will thrive like never before after doing two simple things:Desert Fox , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 4:21 pm GMT3 measly little hikes to the federal funds rate and remove all the foreigners and the spawn of the foreigners.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank to raise the federal funds rate from the current level below 2 percent to 6 percent and then to 10 percent and then to 20 percent. This whole series of asset bubbles the last 40 years can be traced back to 1981 when the federal funds rate was 20 percent. Deliberate asset bubble implosions now!
Implode the asset bubbles and financially liquidate the greedy White nation wreckers born before 1965.
Young White Core Americans must be free of the DEBT BOMB MILLSTONE destroying their future and their country.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the Fed to begin contracting the Fed's balance sheet and there will be a complete halt to dollar swaps and liquidity injections and all the other monetary extremism crud that keeps the asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate inflated.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the immediate implementation of an immigration moratorium and will begin the immediate deportation of all 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA. All foreigners and their spawn shall be immediately removed from the USA and the members of the Deportation Force that puts this policy into action will get 1 million dollars a year for their patriotic efforts.
Politics in the USA Distilled For My Fellow Americans:
DEBT and DEMOGRAPHY
Monetary Policy
Immigration Policy
The USA must get back to a population of 220 million like it was in 1978.
@Charles Pewitt The zionist owned FED must be abolished, this is the key to the zionist control of America and Americans.anon_382 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 4:27 pm GMT@alex in San Jose AKA Digital DetroitTurk 152 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 4:40 pm GMTmeans less when they calmly retort, "I was leaving anyway"
OMG please do
After Iowa, i'm unclear why anyone still thinks the DNC is interested in making any sort of meaningful change to our system towards socialism; rest assured they are not. They blatantly committed election fraud to support the mayor from the CIA, Pete. If he fails, they will put their full support behind Bloomberg, the very definition of a right wing candidate. The threat to our ruling class is not Trump, its Sanders.Current CommenterTrump supports Israel, billionaires, Big Corporations, wars for Oil, Wall Street and so will the DNC candidates Pete and Bloomberg. The rest are just wedge issues to give the masses the illusion of choice.
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Feb 08, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Most of the candidates' responses were predictable. Biden's North Korea policy would be every bit as unrealistic as Trump's, but he shows even less willingness to negotiate. Bloomberg's positions were unsurprisingly the most hawkish of the bunch. If there was an option for using force, he was for it. All of the candidates were unfortunately in agreement with defining Russia as an enemy.
One of the weirder questions asked the candidates whether they would consider using force to "preempt" a nuclear or missile test by either Iran or North Korea. Only Yang and Warren said no. It isn't clear how many of them were serious and how many were just making fun of the absurdity of the question, but it is disturbing that most of the candidates asked about this would entertain taking military action against another country because of a test. Maybe it doesn't need to be said because it is so obvious, but using force to stop a nuclear or missile test is not "preemption" in any sense of the term. A test is not an attack to be preempted, and taking military action to prevent a test would be nothing less than an unprovoked, illegal act of aggression. To her credit, Warren recognizes how dangerous such an attack would be:
No. Using force against a nuclear power or high-risk adversary carries immense risk for broader conflict. Using force when not necessary can be dangerously counterproductive. Again, I will only use force if there is a vital national security interest at risk, a strategy with clear and achievable objectives, and an understanding and acceptance of the long-term costs.
In general, Warren's answers were the most substantive and careful. She not only answered the questions that were put to her, but she gave some explanation of why she took that position and why it was the appropriate thing to do. She correctly rejected Trump's regime change policy in Venezuela, and acknowledged that "Trump's reckless actions have only further worsened the suffering of the Venezuelan people." On North Korea, she remained open to continuing direct talks with Kim Jong-un, but qualified that by saying, "I would be willing to meet with Kim if it advances substantive negotiations, but not as a vanity project." Her negotiating position was similarly reasonable: "A pragmatic approach to diplomacy requires give and take on both sides, not demands that one side unilaterally disarm first." Both Warren and Sanders correctly criticized Trump for the illegal assassination of Soleimani, and they recognized that the president's escalation had put Americans at greater risk. When asked about taking military action against Iran, Warren rejected the idea of a war with Iran and said the following:
I want to end America's wars in the Middle East, not start a new one with Iran. The litmus test I will use for any military action against Iran is the same that I will use as I consider any military action anywhere in the world. I will not send our troops into harm's way unless there is a vital national security interest at risk, a strategy with clear and achievable objectives, and an understanding and acceptance of the long-term costs. We will hold ourselves to this by recommitting to a simple idea: the constitutional requirement that Congress play a primary role in deciding to engage militarily.
The most revealing set of responses came from Pete Buttigieg in that he gave very few responses and had remarkably little to say about his plans. He failed to answer most of the questions he was asked. Of the 36 individual questions included in the 11 sections, he answered only 17 by my count, and many of those were recycled clips from previous speeches, interviews, and debate statements. Despite leaning heavily on his military service in Afghanistan in his campaigning, he failed to answer all of the questions asked about Afghanistan and the U.S. war there. Buttigieg's failure to respond to most of these questions underscores the former mayor's lack of foreign policy experience and knowledge, and it shows that after almost a year his campaign still doesn't have their foreign policy worked out.
Sanders and Warren have set themselves apart from the field in having the most credible foreign policy visions and the strongest commitments to bringing our many unnecessary wars to an end. Biden remains wedded to too many outdated and unworkable policies, and just on foreign policy alone Bloomberg is running in the wrong party's primary. Buttigieg is the least formally qualified top presidential candidate on the Democratic side, and his inability or unwillingness to answer most of these questions shows that. If the moderators bother to ask them about foreign policy, the candidates will have another opportunity to address these issues in the debate tonight, and Buttigieg won't be able to get away with saying nothing.
I don't trust Warren on this, her flimsiness and pandering and propensity to outright lie remind me too much of Romney (who speak of the devil got a backbone for once this week!).=marco01= MPC • a day agoBernie is definitely the best bet for a softer foreign policy.
Warren is one of the most honest politicians. Check her Politifact file, she does far better than even Bernie. Of course neither compares to Trump, his Politifact file is a Pants on Fire dumpster fire.Tom Riddle =marco01= • 21 hours agoThe one thing, and it's only one thing, that causes you to say this is the controversy over her ancestry. But I don't believe she lied, she was raised with the family lore that she had native ancestry and she believed that family lore.
If I had a dollar for every white midwesterner who told me that they had Native ancenstry, I wouldn't be typing comments on disqus, that's for sure. My personal internet comment typer would be doing the typing for me as I dictated from my throne of mammon.=marco01= Tom Riddle • 16 hours agoSure, but that was her family lore. Apparently it was spoken a lot of when she was growing up.Tom Riddle =marco01= • 14 hours agoHer DNA test puts her Native ancestor from around the time of the Revolution, it's easy to see how that could start a family legend.
Im not even really disagreeing. Even if she was wrong, I find it wild that these attacks on her are playing well in Trumpville, since white midwesterners (my people) falsely claiming Native heritage is a most common genre.=marco01= Tom Riddle • 3 hours agoAs we've seen with their support of Trump, conservatives don't seem to have much of a problem with hypocrisy.cka2nd • 20 hours ago • editedThey'll gleefully attack someone for something they are even more guilty of.
I wonder why Gabbard failed to respond to the survey (as per a note on the bottom of the Times' page). A missed chance on her part.Wally • 8 hours agoThis is why I'm voting for Warren in my states primary next month. I just hope she's still in the race!cka2nd Wally • 5 hours agoMy guess is that after South Carolina it will be Sanders vs. Bloomberg vs. one of the other more mainstream Dems, either Mayor Pete, Warren (she's been tacking to the mainstream, right on economics and "left" on wokeness) or Biden, in that order. A fall-off in funding will knock everyone else out of the race (or a failure to move the voting needle if Steyer is self-funding).
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Feb 08, 2020 | www.unz.com
... Biden's fundraising has fallen off, and it is unlikely major donors are going to send cash to a candidate who just ran fourth in Iowa and could run fourth or fifth in New Hampshire.
...Klobuchar is now in the second tier in New Hampshire, behind Sanders and Buttigieg, but right alongside Biden and Warren. A third-, fourth- or fifth-place finish would be near-fatal for them all.
...As for Warren, in her battle with Sanders to emerge as the champion of the progressive wing of the party, her third-place finish in Iowa, and her expected third-place finish in New Hampshire, at best, would seem to settle that issue for this election.
Buck Ransom , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 1:38 am GMT
Uncle Joe's presidential road show may be a bore and a bust, but the upcoming expose of Biden & Son International, Inc. should provide a dumpster-load of drama and comedy all summer long. I wonder how many special guest appearances there will be by the Kerrys, the Clintons, the Obamas and other nice folks Joe knows from DC.Prester John , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 5:29 pm GMT@Buck Ransom That reminds me. Obama was Biden's putative "boss" during the Ukrainian transaction. What did he know and when did he know it?follyofwar , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 5:46 pm GMT@anon IMHO, Bloomberg is ... just one year younger than Bernie, so this is his final rodeo too.Servant of Gla'aki , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 8:39 pm GMT...After the Iowa deep state operation, (it was NOT incompetence), it is clear that the PTB will do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to ensure that Socialist Sanders is not the nominee. Remember, he already has a heart condition. Just sayin'.
The very part-time mayor of South Bend will soon be yesterday's news after South Carolina. Unlike suburban whites, blacks have too much common sense to vote for a homosexual.
@BingoBoingoanon [833] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 9:22 pm GMTMayor Pete's their attempt to groom a new one young, but he seems just as unelectable.
Blacks, men in particular, simply won't vote for Pete Buttigieg. They'll stay home in droves, and more than a few will vote for Trump.
If Buttigieg is the nominee, Election night will look like a Republican landslide straight out of the 1980s.
@follyofwar If it ends up Bloomberg vs Trump what we've got in this country will have transmogrified further from an oligarchy to a full blown aristocracy–certainly a plutocracy–where only billionaires can afford to play king. That race won't be Dems vs GOPers, as both gentlemen have posed as one before switching to the other for simple expedience. Who will be the veep candidates? A Rockefeller and a Rothschild?KenH , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:31 pm GMTBootyjudge is just a short, gay and white version of Obama. But he typifies a government bureaucrat in that he's politically left wing, sexually deviant and hates normal, everyday Americans especially if their skin is white.Zach , says: Show Comment Next New Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:57 pm GMTThe DNC knows that if Biden were to win the nomination he'll commit so many gaffes, like burbling about corn pop, his hairy legs and enjoying kids sitting on his lap, among other things, that Trump would have a field day on Twitter and easily win a second term.
So it's shaping up to be a contest between orange Jebulus vs. anal Pete. By the time the presidential debates arrive both candidates will be vowing to crush white nationalism and improve the lives of black and brown people. White people need not apply.
Nevertheless, Trump's cult like almost all white base will cheer madly for a man who claims to represent them in words only, but almost never in deeds.
@Adrian E. Everyone seems to forget that Sanders will be 79 in 2021...
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Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
karlof1 , Feb 6 2020 19:24 utc | 57
As for Sanders Responsible Foreign Policy , It's clearly not what the D-Party Establishment wants (see Giraldi item linked @53):"The U.S. must lead the world in improving international cooperation in the fight against climate change, militarism, authoritarianism, and global inequality. When we are in the White House, we will:
•Implement a foreign policy which focuses on democracy, human rights, diplomacy and peace, and economic fairness.
•Allow Congress to reassert its Constitutional role in warmaking, so that no president can wage unauthorized and unconstitutional interventions overseas.
•Follow the American people, who do not want endless war. American troops have been in Afghanistan for nearly 18 years, the longest war in American history. Our troops have been in Iraq since 2003, and in Syria since 2015, and many other places. It is long past time for Congress to reassert its Constitutional authority over the use of force to responsibly end these interventions and bring our troops home.
•End U.S. support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has created the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe.
•Rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement and talk to Iran on a range of other issues.
•Work with pro-democracy forces around the world to build societies that work for and protect all people. In the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, democracy is under threat by forces of intolerance, corruption, and authoritarianism."
What follows is Bernie's Mantra, and the Billionaire Class includes the DNC:
" This is your movement . [Emphasis Original]
"No one candidate, not even the greatest candidate you could imagine, is capable of taking on Donald Trump and the billionaire class alone. There is only one way we win -- and that is together . [My Emphasis]
The first step to halting a runaway train is to get an engineer to pull back the throttle and apply the brakes before the train can be reorganized and moved to a different set of tracks. Nothing can get accomplished until that basic effort is won. No, it won't be easy as we must reach the train and its engines before the attempt to halt it can be made. If you insist on being cynical, please be my guest, but get the hell out of the way of those trying to stop the damned thing!!!!!!! Yes, there's some verbiage I don't care for--the democracy promotion being #1. But Gabbard's plank on Ending the Forever Wars is there. And do note in his last point that Sanders recognizes and articulates the truth that the USA also faces the threat of Authoritarianism.
nemo , Feb 6 2020 19:29 utc | 59
" The U.S. must lead the world in improving international cooperation in the fight against climate change, militarism, authoritarianism, and global inequality... "c1ue , Feb 6 2020 19:48 utc | 63So how is the fight against "militarism" and "authoritarianism" not simply code words for regime change, proxy war and sanctions (economic warfare)?
@karlof1 #55Erelis , Feb 6 2020 20:16 utc | 68
Bernie's foreign policy platform, as you posted, is admirable.
I have significant doubts over whether he and/or his movement can enact even a title of it.
I have zero doubt that the platform guarantees the enmity of the entire political establishment, on both sides of the aisle.
Imagine a liberal equivalent of Trump, but without the big biz or MIC assistance.
Could well wind up as one of the least effective administrations evah!@63 c1uelysias , Feb 6 2020 22:01 utc | 78Sanders in his pronouncements about evil Russia, the Ukraine, and VZ has basically messaged to the neocon deep state they can have their policies if they leave him alone on domestic issues. The neocons could care less about Medicare for All, college tuition, etc so long as they control the Pentagon, State department, and their budgets.
If any democrat becomes president, including Sanders, it will ratchet up the odds for a nuclear war with Russia. Any democrat who dares to even talk to Putin will be called a traitor. Any democratic president will have to prove they are tough on Russia, and I am afraid sanctions won't do it. Expect some military action.
Only way Sanders's domestic programs can be funded is by cutting the military budget. As Gabbard keeps saying.Vato , Feb 6 2020 22:35 utc | 83Here is Jimmy Dore ranting about Sanders' Foreign Policy Advisor. Segment starts at 12:35 . Enjoy!Bubbles , Feb 6 2020 22:44 utc | 85But Sanders waffles & hedges and talks about too many things without offering straightforward understandable solutions -ben , Feb 7 2020 1:22 utc | 109 krollchem , Feb 7 2020 1:23 utc | 110Posted by: A User | Feb 6 2020 22:33 utc | 82
And the Grande Orange, America's Evangelicals Newest Messiah said he was going to drain the swamp, make mexico pay for the wall, bring jobs back from china to Make America Great Again, make those factories and Coal Mines hum again!!
Your point was?Vato@83Thanks for the post of the Jimmy Dore show. It pointed that Sanders is another Fascist when it comes to US foreign policy which is the one thing that the President can control as discussed by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, historian and Middle East expert, Stephen Kinzer in New Hampshire (time stamp 12:30).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wrf4meoydIAs we all know, Tulsi Gabbard is misinformed when she states Assad is a dictator and was foolish to volunteer in the Gulf War. At least she calls for an end of regime change wars unlike any current Republican or Democrat in Congress and is willing to talk to any leader.
It is a shame when Gabbard is the only choice for those opposed to fascism. Fascism appears to be the main characteristic of the American way along with the desire for comfort and conformity.
p.s. Unlike Gabbard I didn't volunteer, but was drafted as Conscious Objector medic, medical lab specialist and clinical specialist and was born in the Kingdom of Hawaii.
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Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
VodkaInKrakow , 1 hour ago link
Bezos held a party in DC recently at his place attended by top officials from the Trump Administration. Jared Kushner was there before. They hang out together.
How odd that Bezos is somehow portrayed as some anti-Trump owner of WaPo. Bezos serves his role in Beltway...
Divide et Impera.
Divide and Rule (the rabble).
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Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
VodkaInKrakow , 1 hour ago link
monkman , 1 hour ago linkAs has always been said, Centrist Dems - The Right Wing Democrats dominating the Democratic Party... prefer Trump to Sanders.
It will always be that way. They figure they can stick out four more years of Trump just like they did with Bush and have their victory in 2024.
They are living in the past.
2020, with continued corruption by Centrist Dems? Will result in massive gains for Republicans and massive losses for Centrist Dems. The top party leadership of Centrist Dems are fine with that as long as their own seats are protected from Republican challenge. Deals will be made.
If you look at Trump term? Not much has really changed other than the rabble (Right, Center, and Left) being at each other's throats more than usual. That's they way the elites like it. Rabble like that, so easily divided?
DESERVE TO BE RULED.
Correct, the entire system and most likely that's a long time from now. Unfortunately.The system isn't broken. It's working exactly the way it's intended to work. It ain't a bug, it's a feature. And that feature will remain in operation until the entire sick system is torn down and replaced with something healthy.
* * *
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Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Unless They Change The Democrats Deserve To Lose Trisha , Feb 6 2020 16:12 utc | 6
The Democratic Party seems to intend to lose the 2020 elections.
The idiotic impeachment attempt against Trump ended just as we predicted at its beginning:
After two years of falsely accusing Trump of having colluded with Russia [the Democrats] now allege that he colludes with Ukraine. That will make it much more difficult for the Democrats to hide the dirty hands they had in creating Russiagate. Their currently preferred candidate Joe Biden will get damaged.
...
Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.But the Democrats will surely not touch on those issues. They are committing themselves to political theater that will end without any result. Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation they will pollute the airwaves with noise about 'crimes' that do not exist.
There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House would vote for one the Senate would never act on it. No one wants to see a President Pence.
The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.
The Senate acquitted Trump of all the nonsense the Democrats have thrown against him.
biggerBiden lost in Iowa and his poll numbers elsewhere are not much better. His meddling in Ukrainian politics will continue to be investigated.
Iowa caucuses count was intentionally sabotaged, first through an appn created by incompetent programmers on the payroll of a Buttigieg related company , then by a manipulated manual count by the Iowa Democratic party:
Chris Schwartz @SchwartzForIowa - 22:01 UTC · Feb 5, 2020The state party is now being forced to walk back their error of giving @BernieSanders delegates to @DevalPatrick who received zero votes in Black Hawk County. Press can dm me.
We have known for over 24 hours as verified by our county party that @BernieSanders won the #iacaucuses in Black Hawk County with 2,149 votes, 155 County Delegates. #NotMeUs #IowaCaucuses
biggerThe whole manipulation was intended to enable Buttigieg to claim that he led in Iowa even though it is clear that Bernie Sanders won the race. It worked:
29 U.S.C. § 157 @OrganizingPower - 4:13 UTC · Feb 6, 2020Post Iowa, Buttigieg has gotten a 9pt bounce in Emerson's tracking poll of NH. A bounce based on a caucus he didn't win.
All this is clearly following a plan:
Lee Camp [Redacted] @LeeCamp - 16:58 UTC · Feb 5, 2020If a progressive is about to win #IowaCaucuses:
- remove final polls
- use mysterious app created by former Clinton staffers
- Funnel results thru untested app
- Claim app fails
- Hold results
- Reveal only 62% to give false impression of who won
- Refuse to reveal final resultsBut the cost of such open manipulations is the loss of trust in the Democratic Party and in elections in general:
In sum: We are 24 hours into the 2020 campaign, and Democrats have already humiliated their party on national television, alienated their least reliable progressive supporters, demoralized their most earnest activists, and handed Trump's campaign a variety of potent lines of attack.This so obvious that has to wonder if these outcomes are considered to be features and not bugs .
Buttigieg is by the way a terrible candidate. His work for McKinsey, the company that destroyed the middle class , smells of work for some intelligence agency . His hiring of a Goldman Sachs executive as national policy director makes it clear what his policies will be.
The other leading candidates are not much better. Sanders might have a progressive agenda in domestic policies, but his foreign policies are fully in line with his party. Matt Duss, Sanders' foreign policy advisor, is the son of a lifelong key front man for CIA proxy organizations. He spills out mainstream imperial blabber:
Matt Duss @mattduss - 2:38 UTC · Feb 5, 2020The only thing that Trump's Venezuela regime change policy achieved is giving Russia an opportunity to screw with the US in our own hemisphere. That's what they were applauding.
Giving a standing ovation to Trump's SOTU remarks on Venezuela were of course the Democratic "resistance" and Nancy Pelosi . That was before she theatrically ripped up her copy of Trump's speech, the show act of a 5 year old and one which she had trained for . She should be fired.
Impeachment, the Iowa disaster and petty show acts will not win an election against Donald Trump. While they do not drive away core Democratic voters, they do make it difficult to get the additional votes that are needed to win. Many on the left and the right who dislike Trump will rather abstain or vote for a third party than for a party which is indistinguishable from the currently ruling one.
Meanwhile Trump hauls in record amounts in donations and, with 49%, achieved his best personal approval rate ever .
Either the Democrats change their whole course of action or they will lose in November to an extend that will be breathtaking. It would be well deserved.
Posted by b on February 6, 2020 at 15:57 UTC | Permalink The donor class owners of the "Democratic" party have every incentive to support Trump, who has cut their taxes, hugely inflated the value of their assets, and mis-directed attention away from substantial issues that might degrade either their assets or their power, by focusing on identity politics.
SharonM , Feb 6 2020 16:15 utc | 7
It's obvious to me that the two war parties function as one. The Democrats have been winning since Trump took office--they get their money and they get their wars. If Trump wins, the Democrats win as billionaires flood more money into the DNC. If Trump loses, the Republicans win for the same reasons.Bruce , Feb 6 2020 16:36 utc | 10The behavior of a five year old is an appropriate reference point for most of the people working in DC, albeit engaged parents expect more of their children. This vaudeville routine is giving satisfaction to Republicans, Trump supporters, and those who have been looking for a clearer opportunity to say "I told you so" to diehard Democratic believers (who will continue to refuse to listen).Piero Colombo , Feb 6 2020 17:07 utc | 19
For an American, even one who has always been somewhat cynical regarding cultural notions of democracy and the "American Way," the show has become patently and abusively vulgar and revulsive. It does not appear to be anywhere near "hitting bottom." There can be no recovery without emotional maturity, and the leaders in Washington exhibit nothing of the kind. The level of maturity and wisdom of the individuals involved is determinative of the political result, not the alleged quality of the politics they purport to sell. Right now we don't have that."Unless They Change The Democrats Deserve To Lose"ak74 , Feb 6 2020 17:08 utc | 21Aren't there 2 levels of "change"?
1. How can they change? The owners are the warmongering monopoly capitalist ruling class. Are you imagining that any decision can ever be made by the lowly peons, the rank and file? If you thought anything like that, you should try to find one single instance, in all history, of this "party" ever having done anything at all out of line with the express policy of the owners of the country (the high level of people-friendly noise, intended for the voting peons, never translates into any action of that sort.)
2. If you mean change the electoral policy to win this election, how could they conceivably manage to change this late? Like a supertanker launched at full speed trying to make a sharp turn a few seconds before hitting the shore, you mean?
Anyway, in both cases forget what it "deserves", it should be destroyed and buried under, not only lose.
American democracy is Kabuki Theater and Professional Wrestling.jared , Feb 6 2020 17:30 utc | 26It is the ultimate Reality TV show for the sheeple to think that they have a political voice.
Remember what Frank Zappa said: "Politics is the Entertainment Division of the Military-Industrial Complex."
It would take extreme mental contortions to take U.S. "democracy" seriously at this point.Noirette , Feb 6 2020 17:37 utc | 29
I would like to believe that it makes some difference who is elected, but increasingly doubtful.
How different would it really have been had Hillary been elected (much as it pains me to consider such a scenario)?
Trump was elected (aside from interference from AIPAC) partly because he was republican candidate and for some that's all it takes but aside from that because;
- end pointless wars
- improve healthcare
- control immigration
- jobs for coal miners
- somehow address corruption and non-performance of government
- improve US competitiveness, bring back jobs, promote business, improve economy
He claims having improved the economy but more likely is done juice from the FED.
So really, what grade does he deserve?
And yet people are rallying to his side.
Personally I think that the entrenched interests have moulded Trump to meet their requirements and now it is inconvenient to have to start work on a new president, unless it would be one of their approved choices.
I voted for Trump because of Hillary.
Now I would not vote for Trump given a decent choice. Fortunately there is an excellent alternative.
All who count have known for a long time that Trump will have a second term. Baked in. (1)Jackrabbit , Feb 6 2020 17:47 utc | 31The Dems agitate and raucously screech and try to impeach to distract or whatever to show da base that they hate Trump and hope to slaughter! him! a rapist! mysoginist! racist! liar ! He is horrors! in touch with the malignant criminal authoritarian ex-KGB Putin! Russia Russia Russia - and remember Stormy Daniels! ( :) ! )
The top corp. Dems prefer to lose to Trump, I have said this for years, as have many others. In rivalry of the Mafia type, it is often better to submit to have a share of the pie. Keep the plebs on board with BS etc. Victim status, underdog pretense, becomes ever more popular.
1. Trump might fall ill / dead / take Melania's advice and wishes into account, or just quit.
People still talk like democracy really exists in USA.par4 , Feb 6 2020 17:52 utc | 34They channel their anger toward Party and personality.
If only the democrats would ... If only Sanders would ... If only people would see that ...
A few understand the way things really are, but most are still hoping that somehow that the bed-time stories and entertaining kayfabe are a sort of democracy that they can live with.
But the is just normalcy bias. A Kool-Aid hang-over. This is not democracy. It is a soft tyranny encouraged by Empire stooges, lackeys, and enabled by ignorance.
The lies are as pervasive as they are subtle: half-truths; misdirection; omitting facts like candidate/party affiliations with the Zionist/Empire Death Cult.
The REAL divide among people in the West is who benefits from an EMPIRE/ZIONIST FIRST orientation that has polluted our politics and our culture and the rest of us.
Wake up. War is on the horizon. And Central Banks can't print money forever.
/rage, rage against the dying of the light
!!
After watching Pelosi it reminded me that during the Geo. W. Bush era the Democrats were always claiming to be the adults in the room. It's odd that Mayo Pete's 'husband' is never seen or heard from. I wonder why? Biden's toast and Epstein didn't kill himself. AND Seth Rich leaked Hillary's emails to Wikileaks.Qparticle , Feb 6 2020 18:11 utc | 41-- --DannyC , Feb 6 2020 18:12 utc | 42
The Clinton-Obama administration had scores of corrupt officials and associates (the Podestas, for instance). It was necessary to create a firewall once Trump won the nomination. As so, they attacked his campaign manager, his national security adviser, his family, himself, using all the means of FISA, wire tapping done by NSA and CIA and Mi6 and probably Mossad.Red Ryder | Feb 6 2020 16:56 utc | 14
-- --Trump is an installment of The Mossad via blackmail and media manipulation, check "Black Cube Intelligence", a Mossad front operating from City of London. It would make sense the establishment in the US would eavesdrop on him. Mossad on the other hand would wiretap the wiretapers and give feedback on Trump. The Podesta you mentioned once threatened the factions with "disclosure" possibly to keep the runaway black projects crazies in check not that I wish to play advocate of these people.
-- --
After they lose again in November, they will unleash their street thugs, Antifa, to terrorize the winners. Meanwhile for the purists of the Liberal Cult there will be many real suicides. So, bloodshed and death will become reality.Red Ryder | Feb 6 2020 16:56 utc | 14
-- --Yes, what we need is just a nazi party in the US to keep communism in check, right? We are half way there with Trump already aren't we? "Black Sun" technologies (which a part off I described above) already there, leaking to anyone interested enough that would aid in the great outsourcing for the Yinon project, so why not? "Go Trump 2020"! (sarcasm)
For whatever reason the only thing the Dems seem to find more terrible than a loss to Trump is a win with Bernie. I'm no fan of Bernie but it's clear they're out to sabotage the one guy that would actually beat Trump in an electionVeraK , Feb 6 2020 18:16 utc | 43While I have no illusions that a Sanders administration will have good foreign policy objectives, is there not something to be said for shifting money away from the military-industrial complex in the US? In general Sanders gives me the impression that he wants to reduce US intervention in foreign affairs in favor of spending more money on domestic issues. Even a slight reduction in pressure is helpful for giving other countries the ability to expand their spheres of influence and becoming more legitimate powers in opposition to the US and EU. Based on this I still see voting for Sanders as helpful even if he won't bring about any meaningful change in the US's foreign policy.Pft , Feb 6 2020 19:10 utc | 56it's not an actual Stalin quote, but often used as such
he did say something in the same vein, though.
it IS absolutely spot on here:"It's not who vote that counts, it's who counts the votes"
congratulations, DNC, you're on a par with Joseph Stalin; the most ruthless chairman the Sovyets have ever had.
so here is your real Russia Gate.
oh, come and smell the Irony. In fake wrestling the producers determine the winner in advance and the wrestlers ate given their script to follow. The Dems have no intention to win this, look at the clowns they have running the show not to mention the flawed candidates . The script calls for the king of fake wrestling, Trump himself, to win yet again. Only a concerted effort by the Dems and Deep State media, along with some tech help from Bibis crew can engineer this result, but they are all on board. Dems willing to wait for 2024 when the producers will write them in for a big Win over somebody not named Trump. The world will be ready for a Green change by then, and Soros/Gates boys will have their chance to step up to the plate again.Enjoy the show if you wish, I'm changing the channel.
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Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Bubbles , Feb 6 2020 20:57 utc | 74
Yes pft, the favored candidate of the DNC is clearly Trump.Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Feb 6 2020 19:25 utc | 58
Only if the ungrateful commoners who identify as Democrats or moderates can't be brought to heel and give their full throated support for the DNC's favoured Cookie Cutter candidate who might as well be one of those dolls with a string and a recording you hear when you pull the string.Then yes, they would prefer 'fore moar years!!' of the Ugliest American ever to be installed as President of the United States.
One of things I respect about Tulsi Gabbard is she ain't no Doll with a string attached. When she made the comment about cleaning out the rot in the Democratic Party, she left no doubt her intent and goals. And to take on hillary, the Red Queen to boot, why that was simply delicious.
Alas, the View, the DNC, it's web of evil rich and the media will never forgive her for Soldiering for her Country.
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Feb 04, 2020 | www.unz.com
It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad.
In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, with a near-certain majority vote to acquit the president of all charges.
As weekend polls show socialist Bernie Sanders surging into the lead for the nomination in the states of Iowa, New Hampshire and California, the sense of panic among Democratic Party elites is palpable.
Former Secretary of State and Joe Biden surrogate John Kerry was overheard Sunday at a Des Moines hotel talking of the "possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party -- down whole."
Tuesday, Trump takes his nationally televised victory lap in the U.S. Capitol with his State of the Union address, as triumphant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a humiliated Speaker Nancy Pelosi sit silently side-by-side behind him.
Democrats may declare the Trump impeachment a victory for righteousness, but the anger and outrage, the moans and groans now coming off the editorial and op-ed pages and cable TV suggest the media know otherwise.
History, we are told, will vindicate what Pelosi and the Democrats did and stain forever the Republican Party for voting to acquit.
Perhaps, but only if some future Howard Zinn is writing the history.
Reality: The impeachment of Trump was an attempted -- and failed -- coup that not a single Republican supported, only Democrats in the House and their Senate caucus. The impeachment of Trump was an exercise in pure partisanship and itself an abuse of power.
What was the heart of the Democrats' case to remove Trump?
Trump failed to invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the White House, and held up military aid to Kyiv for several months, to get Zelenskiy to hold a press conference to announce that Kyiv was looking into how Hunter Biden got on the board of a corrupt energy company at a retainer of $83,000 a month while his father was the chief international monitor of corruption in Ukraine.
The specific indictment: Trump's suspension of military aid imperiled "our national security" by denying arms to an "ally" who was fighting the Russians over there, so we don't have to fight them over here.
And what was the outcome of it all?
Zelenskiy got his meeting with the president. He got the military aid in September. He did not hold the press conference requested. He did not announce an investigation of the Bidens. No harm, no foul.
How did President Obama handle Ukraine?
After Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and intervened to protect pro-Russian secessionists in the Donbass, Obama's White House restricted U.S. lethal military aid to Kyiv and provided blankets and meals ready to eat.
What punishment did House and Senate Democrats and anti-Trump media demand for the pause in sending weapons for Ukraine?
Capital punishment, a political death penalty.
Democrats demanded that a Republican Senate overturn the election of 2016, make Trump the first president ever impeached and removed, and then ensure that the American people could never vote for him again.
Nancy Pelosi's House and the Democratic minority in the Senate were demanding that a Republican Senate do their dirty work and keep Trump off the ballot in 2020, lest he win a second term.
For four years, elements of the liberal establishment -- in the media, "deep state" and major institutions -- have sought to destroy Trump. First, they aimed to smear him and prevent his election, and then to overturn it as having been orchestrated by the Kremlin, and then to impeach and remove him, and then to block him from running again.
The damage they have inflicted upon our country's institutions is serious.
U.S. intelligence agencies are being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham for their role in instigating an investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign. The FBI has been discredited by exposure of a conspiracy of top-level agents to spy on Trump's campaign.
The media, by endlessly echoing unproven claims that Trump was a stooge of the Kremlin, discredited themselves to a degree unknown since the "Yellow Press" prostituted itself to get us into war with Spain. Media claims to be unbiased pursuers of truth have suffered, not only from Trump's attacks, but from their own biased and bigoted coverage and commentary.
anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 3, 2020 at 11:18 pm GMT
Always at least a dribble of Beltway, uniparty propaganda that Russia is "our" enemy ruled by a dictator, etc: "After Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea .." Can this columnist not acknowledge that the people of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine after Uncle Sam helped stage a coup and handpicked its new figurehead? He is still on record espousing the claim that Russia "hacked" the 2016 U.S. election.TG , says: Show Comment February 3, 2020 at 11:24 pm GMTAnyone who believes that people above the level of sacrificial flunky "being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham for their role in instigating an investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign" will be charged with a felony is dreaming.
Mr. Buchanan's jobs as Stagehand Right in the Washington puppet show are to whitewash the imperialism and to lead enough Red sheep to vote in the next Most Important Election Ever.
Impeachment was a circus, nothing more.Buck Ransom , says: Show Comment February 3, 2020 at 11:45 pm GMTOoh, lookie lookie, Trump is being impeached! Cheer the noble Democrats striking a blow for freedom and virtue! Or boo the corrupt Democrats for putting on this farce! Take your pick.
But whatever you do, don't pay any attention to the ongoing third-world invasion on our southern border, or the trillions we are wasting on pointless winless foreign wars, or the tens of trillions (that's not a mis-print) we are wasting bailing out and subsidizing Wall Street and financial engineering, don't pay any attention to the fact that most of our drugs are now made in Communist China with very little quality control, and yet prices for these same drugs in the US are skyrocketing. And don't get me started on the growing industry of "Surprise Medical Billing." I could go on but you get the idea.
Yes, impeachment was a bad joke. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Mr. Buchanan continues in his refusal to mention that the Maidan Revolution in the Ukraine was a color revolution backed by the Obama-era State Department, the CIA and various Soros-affiliated NGOs. But he dutifully invokes the Russian annexation of Crimea while never mentioning the fact that it followed a referendum on the issue which was supported by the vast majority in Crimea.Rurik , says: Show Comment February 3, 2020 at 11:46 pm GMTCorvinus , says: Show Comment February 3, 2020 at 11:59 pm GMTAlmost all now concede we have become an us vs. them nation.
hmm..
"Reality: The impeachment of Trump was an attempted -- and failed -- coup that not a single Republican supported, only Democrats in the House and their Senate caucus. The impeachment of Trump was an exercise in pure partisanship and itself an abuse of power."Anonymous [124] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 12:48 am GMTReality–Mr. Buchanan is still smarting from his boss Nixon getting busted, and will stoop to new lows to exonerate him and others on the same trajectory. Of course, impeachment is not a coup, and the Democrats made a strong case. It is other than surprising in an election year where Trump threatened to burn any Republican Senator to the ground that they are "united".
It is laughable that there was this "perfect call", yet he stonewalled any and all efforts to enable witnesses to come forward. Why not have the Bidens, Guiliani, Parnas, Mulvaney, and everyone associated to this scandal be allowed to speak their minds in the Senate? What is the GOP so afraid of?
Several questions remain:
Why did Trump task Giuliani, in a personal capacity, to press Ukraine on the Bidens rather than Trump asking the Department of Justice to investigate? Why were several key administration officials "in the dark" about the activities of Giuliani?
Why did one Trump lawyer say to Senators that the House never authorized a resolution (when it did) for subpoenas of Trump officials, when that same lawyer stated in 2019 that resolution was unnecessary since they would testify on their own behalf?
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to a quid pro quo and then walked it back. Could he testify as to explain why? Why not allow other Trump officials to testify as witnesses to exonerate Trump?
Trump stated he is concerned about adult children benefiting from their father's name? Why did he give his children a place in his administration?
Trump's lawyers argued that in order to convict him, the Senate must find him guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". Except that has never been the standard ever used in past impeachment trial. Why would they make this claim?
Time for a senate investigation into Joe Biden's blatant corruption and abuse of power in the Burisma matter. There has already been a shitload of evidence gathered by Ukraine prosecutors and a French journalist and it all points to Joe actually being guilty of everything the Dems charged Trump with. Subpoena all of it plus sworn testimony from Joe and Hunter themselves (though they will both have to take the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination).Curmudgeon , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 1:02 am GMT@Truth3 He can't get that far, he's still stuck on Russia "annexing" Crimea.gsjackson , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 1:07 am GMT@Truth3 You'd think at 82 and presumably secure financially Pat would let 'er rip once in a while, but he had bigger stones three decades ago when he had a mainstream career in middle age to protect. I met him a couple of times in the '80s, and the pugnacious brawler image he liked to project -- back then, at least -- is not what comes across in person. He was a little reserved and diffident (maybe it was the company). Nothing wrong with that, of course, but you didn't sense a zest for engaging and confronting.R.G. Camara , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 1:09 am GMTAll the coup members should be arrested and tried for treason. Including those working at the corporate news networks who cheered this on.R.G. Camara , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 1:09 am GMTAlso, the Democratic party will cease to be a viable national party by 2030. (ok, it really should be 2032, because that will be the first presidential election they will not be viable, but I'll stick with 2030).
Why? Simple: a political party based on a coalition solely devoted to hating the other side won't work. Political parties, unlike wartime militaries, need a constructive agenda to unite behind. Meaning the party must want to do certain things when in power that everyone in the party agrees on, not merely to trample on their political opponents
Ironically, that's why Bernie's going so well: he's got a constructive agenda. Yes, socialism is evil, but all the other candidates merely say the same flavor of "defeating Trump is paramount." Socialism is at least something to implement beyond recriminations against whitey.
@Corvinus lmao. Our personal paid media-matters troll, Corvinus, is desperately trying to spin his conspiracy theory hoax again. Go, Corvinus, go, earn Mr. Soros's paycheck you maginificent lying bastard!Ozymandias , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 2:38 am GMT@Anonymous "Subpoena all of it plus sworn testimony from Joe and Hunter themselves (though they will both have to take the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination)."Truth3 , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 3:04 am GMTThen charge them with Obstruction Of Congress. Isn't that what you're supposed to do when someone exercises their rights?
@gsjackson Remember this is the guy that was attacked on stage by Jewish thug-wannabees the day he announced his Presidential Campaign and he bounced them off the stage solo.Priss Factor , says: Website Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 3:15 am GMTHe knows the Elephant with the hooked nose well enough is he still afraid of Mossad?
@Truth3 Yup. Jew Coup through and through.Priss Factor , says: Website Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 3:21 am GMTIt makes me wonder. Even though Jews are over-represented in elite institutions, the great majority of Deep State is still made up of goyim. Then, why are they all so servile to Jewish agendas and Jewish wishes? Do goyim lack a mind of their own? If Jews say 'gay marriage', deep state goyim run to fetch the stick. When Jews 'more Wars for Israel', deep state goyim roll over. If Jews say, 'bail out Wall Street', deep state goyim just go along. If Jews say, "fuc* the first and second amendments", deep state goyim nod along. Look at cuck goyim in Virginia grabbing guns to serve their Jewish masters. If Jews say 'let's get Trump', deep state goyim bark and bite.
It could be that deep state goyim just happen to share the same ideas and values as the Jews. Or it could be their minds were molded by Jewish-run media and academia. Or they're just afraid of Jewish power that, via media, blackmail, and bought off politicians, can destroy anyone. Indeed, the sheer chutzpah of all those Jews coming out of the woodwork to unseat an elected president.
Jewish attitude is "Powers Is Ours. All you goyim are just guests at the table."Jews are captains of the ship. Deep State goyim must man the engines with no sense of direction or destiny of their own.
@Corvinus Trump is scump, and yes, he was sniffing at Hunter for political reasons. But there is no smoking gun that he violated any law. It's all speculation.nsa , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 6:11 am GMTStill, Trump did something that was unethical even though he was probing into corruption. He did it for political reasons. After all, if Trump is concerned about corruption, he should begin with US defense budgets.
But Dems are also full of shit. They began with the agenda, "Let's impeach Trump" and grasped for ANYTHING to carry it out. It didn't begin with the possible violation on Trump's part but with the desire to get Trump somehow someway. Impeach Trump was the apriori agenda from the day he was elected.
Besides, if Trump should really be removed, it's for the murder of hero Soleimani. And Obama should have been impeached for his war crimes. But nope. It's some fantasy about Russia Collusion or some triviality about Hunter, another scumbag. Jewish Power pushes American Politicians to do evil things around the world and expresses OUTRAGE only when Jews don't get what they want.
You pretend to be a proggy, but you're just Hasbara. It's so obvious. Give it up.
@Priss Factor Henry Ford was the last WASP to resist jew banking and finance. 100 years ago, Ole Henry bought a newspaper dedicated to attacking the jew, and he disseminated the Elders of Zio through all his dealerships. He also tried to prevent the jew's favorite project at the time ..WW1. The jew stomped Ole Henry double plus good and got their war. The WASP establishment took careful note of Ford's humiliation, and took in the jew as a junior partner in running and looting the country. 100 years later, the jew is running government, media, and finance ..with the WASP as a very junior partner, mostly playing the role of useful idiot providing the cannon fodder and taxes for jew wars.John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 7:30 am GMT@Truth3 You and other "blame da jooz" lurkers at Unz clearly haven't spent much time around non-Jewish White leftists as Pat obviously has. There is no great conspiracy he is trying to avoid.El Dato , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 7:56 am GMTI went to a college where every single professor was doing their best to indoctrinate the students and 90% of them were Anglo or Nordic.
For every Jewish leftist lawyer you can point at in DC there are a thousand non-Jewish White lawyers behind the scenes.
Liberalism is a sickness that would still exist even if you got rid of the Jews. Have a look at Deutschland if you doubt this.
Here is the kicker: The non-Jewish leftists know they are lying. It isn't some brainwash job by the Jewz. Liberal professors and media commentators know they are lying. They think it is all justified. In their minds we are the problem and lies or gulags are just fine if the end is the same.
The worst leftist of all time was not Jewish and in fact sent a lot of Jews packing. His name was Stalin, maybe you have heard of him.
@Truth3 But that get-out is a bit easy. It's like ghetto denizens complaining about "the man".Ludwig Watzal , says: Website Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 8:33 am GMTYes, philosophical high ground, media high ground, rent-a-mob management ground and self-unaware ability to act decisively and shamelessly has been taken. Now what? Order up a box of Red Bull?
The sad fact is that there are REAL reasons for getting Trump's ass dragged off into the sunset, but they involve wars and hits for you-know-who, so nobody is ever going to mention those.
Pat Buchanan describes all the steps of a corrupt political system to remove a sitting US President from office with bogus charges, and their handlers in the media played the loudspeakers and an inaffable role. This gang bears the responsibility that all the major institutions are untrustworthy. CNN leads the lying press crowd. I was not surprised hearing that the Iowa caucus did produce any results yet. As it seems, the "right" person didn't come out first; Joe Biden. The corrupt Democratic Party starts already at the beginning of the primaries by rigging the election. The Dems are still suffering from the defeat of the Queen of Darkness, Hillary Clinton, and their corrupt entourage. The Democratic Parts seems incapable to clean out this Augean stable. The last telling example has been the charade of impeachment. As long no Heads will roll, the Democratic Party will remain in the political quagmire, and corruption will prevail.Tulip , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 11:43 am GMTWhat Sanders is doing is revolutionary, in the sense that he is raising enough money to run a national campaign, and winning, without taking corporate money.Realist , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 12:15 pm GMTAmerican politics is controlled by a two-party cartel, and candidates have to join the cartel and take the corporate money to get elected, resulting in policies like high immigration that make sense to the Chamber of Commerce but not to many voters. Sure, you can pander to voters and then do the bidding of the Chamber, but a candidate that does more than pander is a stronger candidate.
You could have a real populist right if you had a candidate who could generate campaign funding solely from grass roots contributions and refused to take corporate money. Granted this is not the culture of the GOP, but the reality is that the program of the American cartels is deeply unpopular with huge swaths of the American people, and the future belongs to the group that can effectively carry out a hostile take-over of the organization and then, not having to obey the corporate donors, puts in place a political program that actually accomplishes the agenda: something like mandatory everify rather than say stupid symbolic fights about a "wall" that never gets built, or maybe conduct a foreign policy that does not have to have pre-approval from Sheldon Adelson.
@Priss FactorRealist , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 12:22 pm GMTIt makes me wonder. Even though Jews are over-represented in elite institutions, the great majority of Deep State is still made up of goyim. Then, why are they all so servile to Jewish agendas and Jewish wishes?
Jews have lots of wealth and control the narrative. Plus the average Jew is smarter than the average goyim.
Do goyim lack a mind of their own?
In many cases yes.
It could be that deep state goyim just happen to share the same ideas and values as the Jews. Or it could be their minds were molded by Jewish-run media and academia.
The latter is the case.
Jews are captains of the ship. Deep State goyim must man the engines with no sense of direction or destiny of their own.
This has happened many times in history the out come not so good for Jews.
@nsaJohnny Smoggins , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 1:17 pm GMTHenry Ford was the last WASP to resist jew banking and finance.
And Henry Ford actually produced something of value. As opposed to most rich Jews who produce financial products , which are detrimental to most goyim, but very lucrative to Jews.
@John Johnson "The worst leftist of all time was not Jewish and in fact sent a lot of Jews packing. His name was Stalin, maybe you have heard of him."Truth3 , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 2:50 pm GMTNo the worst leftist of all time was the creator of it all, Karl Marx, who absolutely was Jewish. Jews like to use goy cat's paws like Stalin, Roosevelt and Bush to do their dirty work but never forget who's behind it all.
@John Johnson Rosa Kaganovich would call you an idiot so I don't have to.TGD , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 3:58 pm GMTPat wrote:John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 4:23 pm GMTHow we accomplish great things again, giv(en) our seemingly unbridgeable differences, remains a mystery.
Hasn't the US had enough of "accomplishing great things?" Let's pull back and stop trying to remake the world in our own image.
@Johnny Smoggins No the worst leftist of all time was the creator of it all, Karl Marx, who absolutely was Jewish. Jews like to use goy cat's paws like Stalin, Roosevelt and Bush to do their dirty work but never forget who's behind it all.Rurik , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 4:39 pm GMTMarx was half-Jewish and White egalitarian marauding predates Marxism. Napoleon and Lincoln both believed in war for equality.
Did the Jews force Stalin to send millions to the Gulag? Was pol pot also forced by the Jews to kill his own people? Pretty amazing that Jews were able to manipulate even Asian leftists when there were zero Jews in those countries.
The corollary of blaming Jews for everything is that non-Jewish leftists are never responsible for their own actions. This is amusing since behind closed doors leftist leaders will admit certain politically incorrect truths which shows they are not Goy-drones. But according to the Unz Blamin' Jews club they are just victims of manipulation. Poor wittle victims that are consciously lying and would send us all to gulags if they could.
@anonymousJohn Johnson , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 5:23 pm GMTCan this columnist not acknowledge that the people of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine
Whose Side Is God on Now?
April 4, 2014 by Patrick J. Buchanan
In his Kremlin defense of Russia's annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond.
Crimea, said Putin, "is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus."Indicting the "Bolsheviks" who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, "May God judge them."
Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.
Putin is plugging into some of the modern world's most powerful currents.
Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America's arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.
He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.
https://buchanan.org/blog/whose-side-god-now-6337
It seems to me, that in a sense, Buchanan is declaring that Putin is 'planting Russia's flag' as the new moral center of the dying ((murdered)) Western world, with Moscow as the " the Third Rome".
As the West descends into the moral 'sewer', Putin's Russia is returning to the ideals of Christian virtues and traditional values.
"But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia's role, in Putin's words, is to "prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state."
Would that be the "chaotic darkness" and "primitive state" of mankind, before the Light came into the world?"
In other words, Patrick Buchanan knows very well indeed who the villains are vis-a-vis Crimea, and Russia, vs. the ((Globohomo)). And he's willing to say so, eloquently, when it suits him to do so.
But even so, there was that vomit reflex moment when I read "writes WCF's Allan Carlson, "Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values . "
So Pat does pepper his articles with paeans to the Globohomo vernacular of the day, I suppose for reasons of appealing to the masses, such as they are. But if you've been reading Pat for as long as I have, you know he's well aware of the subtle nuances behind claims of 'annexing Crimea', but this column is all about the obvious corruption on display with the impeachment farce, and how the Democrats all gush when Obama does something corrupt, but howl and screech when it's 'done' by Trump.
So in that context, he's simply using Crimea as an example of Democrat hypocrisy. Like trying to impeach Trump for endeavoring to uncover the rat-hole of uber-corruption between Obama/Hillary/Biden/Nuland – and the former regime in Ukraine.
IOW, what Trump did, (what he was actually impeached for) was the "off the reservation" attempt to expose their uber-corruption. That he trusted the current ((regime)) in Ukraine, and in his own deepstate, was his monumental error.
Then, there's this:
The NSC and State Department have been exposed as employing individuals with an exaggerated view of their role in the origination and the execution of foreign policy. Disloyalty and animosity toward the chief executive appear to permeate the upper echelons of the "deep state."
The arrogance on display from all those diplomats, with sanctimonious outrage, at a president that actually thinks *he's* in charge of foreign policy! 'Who does he think he is?!, to decide when Ukraine gets their belligerent weapons to use on Putin's/Hitler's aggressive Russia?! These decisions are all made wayyyy above that asshole's pay grade, and we need to put him in his place!'
Not in our lifetime have the institutions of government and the establishment been held in lower regard.
Almost all now concede we have become an us vs. them nation.
Liberal Jews, who hate Trump's guts with the searing heat of a thousand exploding suns, vs. war mongering neocon Jews, who also hate Trump, but see in him a very pliant and useful idiot.
@ Priss
Or they're just afraid of Jewish power that, via media, blackmail, and bought off politicians, can destroy anyone.
Bingo
If you're a goyim in the administration, and you mumble something about how much the wars are costing, either in untold trillions or in political capital, the dagger-eyed glowering would be immediate from every Jew in the room. 'So, we have a little wannabe Himmler here. He'll soon fine out what happens to Adolf wannabes, when he gets his arse handed to him, and he's out on the streets'. Make him the first on your list.'
Everyone with two synapses to rub together, knows that all these wars are Jewish supremacist wars of conquest. Duh. Even the war on Yemen, is a proxy war against Iran. So the moment anyone tries to rein in the belligerence, he's going to have Hymie to pay. And that is what this really is all about. Trump's holding back weapons from Ukraine, is seen as counter productive to the ((greater agenda)), and so they pile on. And if the president of the United States, can be keelhauled for a year, and impeached, for daring to obstruct the Eternal Wars for Israel*, then how well will some lesser veck fare if he too thinks the wars are not the greatest thing since sliced bread?
The Jews are uniform and connected on certain subjects. The Eternal Wars are one of them. I know some liberal Jews. To this day, they seem to worship Obama, and loath Trump with obvious distain, (clear hatred), but when it comes to the wars, they're kosher.
That's why there's perfect conformity from both isles in DC, on the need to continue the wars. That's why both Fox news and ABCNNBCBS.. et al, are all perfectly aligned on that particular issue. Which is why Tulsi has been 'Ron Pauled'. When it's something all Jews are all aligned on ** , then it's unwritten, and woe be to any wrong-minded goyim, who's brave enough to step over that particular line.
*Obama got a pass on a lot of things, because the liberal Jews gushed when he walked into the room. Trump gets no such leeway.
** .. in reality, since first entering Congress in 1991, Sanders has compiled a lengthy record of support for war and defense of the predatory interests of American imperialism."
Sanders' record demonstrates what he considers "necessary wars." It also includes the NATO air war against Serbia in 1999, launched on the pretext of stopping the imminent ethnic cleansing of Kosovars.
In 2001, Sanders joined in a near-unanimous vote in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan. Today -- now that the nearly twenty-year-long war is widely unpopular -- Sanders conveniently declares that his earlier vote was a "mistake." But he has continued to endorse US wars in the Middle East, including the US proxy war in Syria.
Sanders has also supported Israel's repeated assaults on Gaza, imperialist war crimes made possible with the support of the United States. In a 2014 town hall meeting, Sanders shouted down an antiwar protester who challenged his support for Israel even as it was committing egregious crimes against the Palestinian population.
Moreover, Sanders has publicly voiced support for the use of assassinations and "extraordinary rendition" in the so-called "war on terror." In 2015, when asked whether anti-terrorism policies under a Sanders administration would include drones and special forces, Sanders replied that he supported "all that and more."
I'm amazed Pat even posts here when half of you guys couldn't analyze the contents of a turkey sandwich without some screed about Jews.follyofwar , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 5:57 pm GMTJews are depicted as some monolithic bloc and yet Israel would undoubtedly take Trump over Sanders.
So the first Jewish president would be rejected by the world wide Jewish conspiracy? Some conspiracy.
As a reminder the presidential candidate that actually wanted government troops to kick in doors and take guns was an Irish Texan. But I'm sure that's somehow the fault of Jews even though the Jewish candidate has been a moderate on guns.
In the fifth paragraph, Pat writes: "Tuesday, Trump takes his nationally televised victory lap in the US Capitol with his SOTU address, as Mitch McConnell and a humiliated Speaker Nancy Pelosi sit silently side-by-side behind him."anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 6:18 pm GMTI'll forgive Pat the senior moment, as he surely knows that VP Pence, not Mitch McConnell, will be sitting next to our senile Speaker.
@Rurik "In other words, Patrick Buchanan knows very well indeed who the villains are vis-a-vis Crimea, and Russia, vs. the ((Globohomo)). And he's willing to say so, eloquently, when it suits him to do so.Rurik , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 6:58 pm GMT
[I]f you've been reading Pat for as long as I have, you know he's well aware of the subtle nuances behind claims of 'annexing Crimea', "Please. Just run "Crimea" in the search engine against Mr. Buchanan's columns. -- > 11/22/2019: " .. 2014, when Vladimir Putin's Russia seized Crimea .." What's subtle or nuanced about "seized"? Do I need to show you some of his other Beltway bits, like his standing assertion that Russia "hacked" the 2016 US election?
I repeat: Mr. Buchanan's jobs as Stagehand Right in the Washington puppet show are to whitewash the imperialism and to lead enough Red sheep (like you?) to vote in the next Most Important Election Ever.
Refute it, or admit it. Neither should require another 1,300 words.
@John JohnsonJohnny Smoggins , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 7:13 pm GMTJews are depicted as some monolithic bloc and yet Israel would undoubtedly take Trump over Sanders.
in the comment right above this one, I just wrote
"Liberal Jews, who hate Trump's guts with the searing heat of a thousand exploding suns, vs. war mongering neocon Jews, who also hate Trump, but see in him a very pliant and useful idiot."
Jews don't control everything. But when it comes to N. America's foreign policy, you'd have to be a huge knucklehead not to know of AIPAC, CFR, and PNAC, and all the other Jewish supremacist institutions herding our congress-critters like so many sheep, to their Eternal Wars for Israel.
Or ,
..you can explain how its in the American people's interest to spend seven+ trillion, (all of it borrowed at interest) to slaughter, main and displace millions of innocent people, who just happen to be inconvenient to Israel's imperial ambitions. While simultaneously getting tens of thousands of young American soldiers dead, maimed or so soul-shattered they're committing suicide at some 20 a day?
Or, would you really have us all believe, that Saddam did 9/11, and that he and Gadhafi had WMD, because they "hate our freedom", and so we have to "fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here"
?@John Johnson But for the Jews who controlled the Communist party in the Soviet Union grooming and promoting him, Stalin would've been a minor tyrant terrorizing the peasantry in the Georgian countryside. Unfortunately for them, their pet got out of control and started to bite the hand that fed him. The corollary to this is Jews in the US promoting "civil rights" and then having some of their negro pets (like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) turn on them.Rurik , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 7:20 pm GMTRemind us friend, where the idea for Marxism came to Asians from? The answer of course is from the Jew Marx with financing provided by Jacob Schiff and other wealthy Jews. Perhaps Pol Pot may have found some other outlet for his murderous instincts but as has been the case in so many instances around the world, it was Jewish Marxism that not only lit the fuse, but set it up to begin with.
Don't get me wrong, do gooder Christian types are nearly as much to blame for the mess we're in as the Jews. The difference is that while Christians are naive, gullible and stupid, their motivations are essentially good even if the outcome is bad. With Jews, the motivation behind what they do is pure malice.
You seem new here. Welcome. Do some more reading and exploring and then comment more. You're not the first newbie to wander in from Breitbart ready to defend Israel and the Jews without first having educated himself, and you won't be the last.
@anonymousJohn Johnson , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 8:44 pm GMTDo I need to show you some of his other Beltway bits, like his standing assertion that Russia "hacked" the 2016 US election?
from my little screed
"So Pat does pepper his articles with paeans to the Globohomo vernacular of the day, I suppose for reasons of appealing to the masses, such as they are."
Mr. Buchanan's jobs as Stagehand Right in the Washington puppet show are to whitewash the imperialism and to lead enough Red sheep (like you?) to vote in the next Most Important Election Ever.
Refute it, or admit it.
I admit it!
HAHAHAAAAHAAA!!!
I'm actually a Trump supporter because, that's right! I'm a racist!!!
HAHAHAAAHAAAA!
That's why we're all pretending that the Dems are actuyally way worse than Trump when it comes to the Eternal Wars, because we all secretly love Trump, because he called Mexicans 'bad hombres!! And he said Obama wasn't born here, and we all love that kind of RACISM!
HAHAHAAAAA!!!!
When ever he mocks Maxine Waters, we all laugh at how racist we all are, and that's why Pat and the Deplorables and all of us closet racists are going to pull the lever for Trump!
Because we're racists!! And we don't even worship Obama!! the One!!!
HAHAHAAAHAAAA!!!!
White supremacy, baby!!!
HAHAAAHAAAAAAA!!!!
You're going to get four more years of Orange clown racism! He grabs fulsomely offered gold-digger's pussies like crazy, and we don't even care!!!
We even like, that he likes women, and isn't even gay!!
HAHAHAAAA
I was just talking to a buddy of mine, and we were lamenting some of Trump's more egregious disappointments, (assassinating world leaders, tossing Bibi's salad, etc..). But there was one thing about which we could agree, as bad as Trump is, (and he's a disaster), we are very much going to enjoy the show, as Hillary and Madow and Maxine and all the other white-male-castrating hags and losers and SJW POS, will be soul-raped on election day.
That, might go a long way towards mollifying Trump's disastrous presidency.
Sometimes I watch those videos of the reaction to the 2016 election, and the tears, and howls of existential angst, from Hillary supporters, and boy oh boy are those memories great.
heh
@Rurik Jews don't control everything. But when it comes to N. America's foreign policy, you'd have to be a huge knucklehead not to know of AIPAC, CFR, and PNACSolontoCroesus , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 8:49 pm GMTZomg Jewish lobbies. You can actually be against aid to Israel while not taking the view that Jews control every single war and leftist action. Not everything has to be about the Jews.
Or, would you really have us all believe, that Saddam did 9/11, and that he and Gadhafi had WMD, because they "hate our freedom", and so we have to "fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here"
What would make you think that I believe Saddam did 9/11? I have said nothing of the sort.
It's actually possible to be against foreign wars and also against blaming the Jews for everything. Anglo leaders have started foreign wars without the influence of Jews. If that angry Austrian didn't start a needless war with Poland we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today. Then he went and made his great dunderheaded move of attacking Russia before defeating Britain. Did the Jews make him do it while they were in boxcars? The Romans started all kinds of needless foreign wars without Jewish influence. But if a US president does it then MUST BE the Jews. Nevermind that GWB talked about wanting to get even with Saddam or that Cheney had all sorts of war industry connections. Just blame Jews, it's the Unz way. Thank you Mr. Jewish Unz for providing this forum.
Disagree w/ Buchanan's key premise: the coup leaders, as Rick Wiles identified them, the Jew Coup, got everything they wanted and still have tethers in place to force more from Trump, in the fullness of time.John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 9:02 pm GMT-- Give us Golan or we'll unleash "six ways til Sunday"
-- Give us Jewish capital in Jerusalem or we will unleash "six ways til Sunday"
-- Convey gas rights in Golan to Cheney, other Jewish and American interests or we'll unleash "six ways til Sunday"
-- Kill Soleimani or we'll unleash "six ways til Sunday"
-- Give us full sovereignty and political cover to take all of ersatz Israel, Palestinians be damned, or we'll unleash "six ways til Sunday"
-- Ensure that Syria remains fragmented and without financing to rebuild or we'll unleash "six ways til Sunday"
--
By the way: those of you familiar with gematria or Kabbalah -- remember Schiff's "parody" of the Trump phone call? Among its other weird references that, I suspect, were not without esoteric meaning, Schiff repeated the number seven. Does that mean anything?IMHO, the outcome -- 'acquittal' in the Senate -- is just as pre-ordained by Schiff-Nadler – Engel – Schumer, as was the No vote on witnesses: Dems are just as dirty as GOP; they'd have been pissing in their Guccis if Republicans had voted to call more witnesses who might have implicated Democrats in corruption.
AGREE that Pelosi has been humiliated: nothing Jew Coupers like better than using, then humiliating a Catholic; that she is Italian (Roman) is cream cheese on the bagels.
@Johnny Smoggins But for the Jews who controlled the Communist party in the Soviet Union grooming and promoting him, Stalin would've been a minor tyrant terrorizing the peasantry in the Georgian countryside.Rurik , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 9:48 pm GMTWhere does Lenin fall into this revisionist history? He had nothing to do with the rise of Stalin? Why didn't the Jews rally around Trotsky, an actual Jew?
Anyways the Jews dominated the NKVD, not the central party. They executed anyone including Jews. Their top leaders were eventually executed by Stalin to cover up his crimes. Their hegemony in the NKVD was eventually broken but the "Jewish USSR" myth remained for decades.
Remind us friend, where the idea for Marxism came to Asians from? The answer of course is from the Jew Marx with financing provided by Jacob Schiff and other wealthy Jews.
This is exactly the irrational thinking that I am talking about. If some Asian dictator kills a million people you actually blame a half-Jew's Communist book even though said book never called for killing a million people. Total removal of responsibility. You are giving a free pass to any blood thirsty leftist.
Don't get me wrong, do gooder Christian types are nearly as much to blame for the mess we're in as the Jews. The difference is that while Christians are naive, gullible and stupid, their motivations are essentially good even if the outcome is bad.
This shows you don't even understand leftiest leadership in the US or EU. They are mostly secular, not Christian. They are not manipulated children. They know exactly what they are doing and fully intend to
transform the US into Brazil.Whites like Edwards and Beto are not the pawns of some Jewish indoctrination project. They know full well that they are lying to the public. Nothing on this website would surprise them. You could tell them all about Jewish lobbies or Jews in the NKVD and they wouldn't care. Leftists have an egalitarian vision and don't care about what you have to say.
@John JohnsonJohnny Smoggins , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 9:57 pm GMTNot everything has to be about the Jews.
not everything is..
But the Eternal Wars for Israel, are.
Btw, you're an imbecile
@John Johnson Can we agree that a person needn't actually be a believer himself to carry the ideals that the religion espoused?SeekerofthePresence , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 10:43 pm GMTMarx may have never worn a yarmulke or even believed in God but that doesn't mean that his actions, perhaps unconsciously, weren't rooted in Jewish ideals. And every single SJW, even the most stridently atheist, is animated by Christian ideals about making the world a better place.
Bottom line – Whites are in the sorry state we're in because of both Jews and Christians but Jews were, and are, motivated by a poisonous hatred of Whites. We'll have to deal with dumb Christians and SJWs on our own, we don't need Jews with all their money, power and hate helping them.
You're right though; Before we can tackle the Jewish problem we have to clean our own house first.
@Priss Factor Sounds like the couple on their honeymoon who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Not sure if they survived.eah , says: Show Comment February 4, 2020 at 11:04 pm GMTa Failing EstablishmentJohn Chuckman , says: Website Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 12:54 am GMTActually the Establishment is doing fine: the government employs more people, spends more money, and exerts more influence than ever, while big tech censors legitimate opposition/dissent.
It's the American people who are screwed by being chained to this freak show by the coercive tax system, especially when it's obvious voting makes no difference.
"Already, the odds of a modern 30-50-year-old dying from suicide, alcohol, or drugs in America are 10 times as high as the odds an 18-35-year-old in 1960 had of dying in Vietnam." https://t.co/RrudZ1cvwX
-- Christoph Nahr (@ChrisNahr) January 27, 2020
Ridiculous use of the word "coup."Crazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 1:23 am GMT@Corvinus Maybe you should contact Gordon Duff over at VT. He'd probably hire you in a New York minute. It seems that you don't even have the decency to admit that the Impeachment was nothing but a Deep State orchestrated circus or more accurately farce actually unbelievably promoting the NeoNazi State of Ukraine as our "ally" who were fighting the evil Rooskies on our behalf.David Walters , says: Website Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 1:45 am GMTNumber one. Why would it be in the interest of the American people to get involved in a proxy war with Russia? A nation that happens to have more nukes and a more effective and deadlier method of delivering them than we do. According to military analysts we are at least two decades behind them.
Next even if Russia was a valid target. They are not attacking Russia they are attacking Dombass, dumb ass which happens to be a breakaway region of Ukraine.
Two. Talk about being low life sniffling scum they embrace John Bolton the epitome of Neocon subversion as an "ally". Just shows how low the establishment demoncrats have sank proving that they have no moral compass whatsoever and like the CIA the ends justify the means.
What you and the DemonCrats have shown is that you aren't any better than Trumpenstein but probably in many ways far worse.
Well done! Shit head.
"The damage they have inflicted upon our country's institutions is serious."SeekerofthePresence , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 1:47 am GMTNo more true words have ever been printed.
I fear for my country.
Coup is 'Murikan as apple pie.SeekerofthePresence , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 2:12 am GMT
"It's Californication!"
Destroy the other or say good bye.
Devil's inauguration.@Crazy Horse The Sarmat ICBM is now in serial production and being deployed. Range: 18,000km. Payload: 10 nuclear or hypersonic warheads.Sulu , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 4:38 am GMT@Corvinus Hey Corvinus,Crazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 5:15 am GMT
The Democrats swung and missed. It was a Hail Mary effort that was bound to fail but their blind hatred of Trump would not allow them to see the inevitable outcome. The Democrats simply can't accept that their annotated one (Hillary) was just not Presidential timber, but many voting Americans could see it. You lost in 2016 and you will lose the Presidency in 2020, almost certainly. If you lose the house too that will simply be the icing on the cake. Democrats will then be relegated to the sidelines and will be able to do nothing but squall impotently from the dark spaces they all inhabit. I await your lamenting and gnashing of teeth after Nov.The Democratic party may be done for a decade because of this. Their continued actions have damaged themselves and strengthened Trump but their denial does not allow them to see it.
Democrats are like the tranny males they claim to espouse. When they look in the mirror the reflection they see is that of a beautiful girl. But in reality all they are is just a bunch of dicks.
@SeekerofthePresence Exactly we're at least 20 years beyond the Rooskies as far as hypersonic weapons. They're still on the drawing boards here while:John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 5:21 am GMThttps://www.fort-russ.com/2019/08/russia-is-ahead-of-us-in-hypersonic-technologies-experts-say/
@Johnny Smoggins And every single SJW, even the most stridently atheist, is animated by Christian ideals about making the world a better place.John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 5:22 am GMTBottom line – Whites are in the sorry state we're in because of both Jews and Christians but Jews were, and are, motivated by a poisonous hatred of Whites. We'll have to deal with dumb Christians and SJWs on our own, we don't need Jews with all their money, power and hate helping them.
I don't actually believe this is the case and I'm not trying to be argumentative.
If Christianity is the underlying problem then European countries with greater declines in Christianity should see less support for liberalism. Children raised in secular households should be less like to be liberal.
This hasn't happened and in fact the opposite is true. Sweden is very secular and very leftist. Children raised in secular homes are far more likely to be liberal. The data is clear on this.
We aren't dealing with Christianity or some pseudo form. We are dealing with a new egalitarian religion called liberalism. The leaders are secular are fully conscious of what they are doing. If anything Christianity in the right form can provide a layer of inoculation.
So no I don't think blaming Jews or Christians is valid or helpful.
@Rurik Btw, you're an imbecileanon [311] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 6:11 am GMTUr Stooped.
Did you get an award from the Unz Joo Hatin' club for that brilliant retort?
@Corvinus Hey. Some Democrat candidates got what they wanted. Old Joe Biden barely survived Iowa, which was not unintended collateral damage, but rather very intended and targeted. I can imagine Elizabeth Warren's fingerprints all over this one.Crazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 7:45 am GMTWe will see in November exactly who was too clever by half.
@Crazy Horse Meant to say behind not "beyond" oopsieredhorse , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 9:18 am GMTThe french had a solution during their revolution!swamped , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 9:19 am GMT@John Johnson "This hasn't happened and in fact the opposite is true. Sweden is very secular and very leftist" Sweden is not as 'leftist' as often portrayed. In the last election the Social Democrats fell to their lowest vote share in over 100 years. They were reduced to only 100 seats in the Riksdag (less than a 1/3)& formed a minority coalition govt. with the Greens & Commies comprising only 144 seats. The centrist Alliance coalition picked up 143 seats & the rising stars – the right-wing Sweden Democrats, rose to 62 seats. The coalition was slightly revamped after an early vote of no-confidence but the Social Democrats are waning & the centrist & right-wing Parties are gaining. The most recent polls in the country show the Sweden Democrats actually running ahead of the Social Democrats now, making it the most popular Party in the country at this time. Most of those "Johnson's" aren't very leftist anymore. But this still doesn't detract from the fact that Christianity is NOT the problem. After all, our greatest living pundit, Pat Buchanan, is Christian & he's no raving, leftist loony.KenH , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 2:03 pm GMTLike a coup really matters when Trump has turned into either Jeb Bush or Lindsey Grahamnesty without the lisp and the drawl. Trump has become orange Jebulus. He's not the Donald Trump I voted for in 2016. The Potomoc fever bug finally bit him.Tulip , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 4:22 pm GMTAt Trump's State of the Zionist Union speech (SOTZU) he received raucous applause and shouts of "four more years" from the Republican side of the chamber. Most of these people used to oppose him but now that Trump has sold out to the deep state (if he ever really opposed it in the first place), especially on foreign policy, they love him and have accepted him as one of their own.
@KenH Orange golem good, muh capitalism!follyofwar , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 4:45 pm GMT@SolontoCroesus Not to worry, Pelosi got her revenge last night when she churlishly tore up her copy of Trump's SOTU address right after he was done speaking. What a classless little tramp that woman is.Virgile , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 6:26 pm GMTIs it not true, though, that the three biggest Jewish plotters in Congress (Schiff, Nadler, and Schumer) have been equally humiliated?
Hillary Clinton, Nany Pelosi and her likes have poisoned deaply the democratic party without any chance of cure soon.siberiancat , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 8:27 pm GMT
Revenge for their humiliation has been the engine behind the Muller trial and the impeachment circus.
They failed dramatically and now the DNC is not only more humiliated but it has lost the little credibility it still had.
Only an old fashioned democrat leader can bring back confidence in the democratic ideology that has been lost by Hillary and Cie. It seems too late for this to happen and Trump will be back . As it is expected that the economy in the US may enter into a recession in the second term, why taking away from him the humiliation he will face?@John Johnson Marx himself was of a pure ethnic Jewish stock. His father converted to Christianity.John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 8:50 pm GMT
His wife was German.@swamped Sweden Democrats actually running ahead of the Social Democrats now, making it the most popular Party in the country at this time. Most of those "Johnson's" aren't very leftist anymore. But this still doesn't detract from the fact that Christianity is NOT the problem.John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 9:01 pm GMT
They have around 20% of the vote which is significant but the majority still buys into mainstream leftist BS.After all, our greatest living pundit, Pat Buchanan, is Christian & he's no raving, leftist loony.
Good point and quite ironic that we have someone here blaming Christians when PB is a stalworth against the left. Some of the strongest anti-left parties in Europe are in Eastern Europe where support for the church is strong. The belief that secularism undermines liberalism simply doesn't match the data. If anything it seems that secular Whites double down on liberalism because they don't have a religion.
@siberiancat Marx himself was of a pure ethnic Jewish stock. His father converted to Christianity.anonymous [284] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 10:35 pm GMT
His wife was German.There is no such thing as pure German-Jewish stock. They are all mixed. There was a DNA test a while back proved this.
It is Feb 5th and teh US Senate has absolve the President, thus ending 4yrs of endless Conspiracies, coups and impeachments. Trump has emerge victorious and single handedly destroy the DEMs party , this in spite of the Fake news establishment, the deepstate and people within his own innercircle. Trump with the support of the American Deplorables have defeated the DEM/LEFT/Antifa continues attacks. BUT it seems that the GOP does NOT understand, realize the golden historical unprecendentes opportunity to REnake the party, rolled back the Great BLUE wave that never was. The GOP is poised to recover the House, turn the Blue states RED again. IF the GOP does NOT keep this momentum going, if they break their inner discipline, or the GOP makes the ILL mistake to sabotage Trump the GOP will go back to playing second fiddle to the DEMs and will probably lose their best chance to REmake, REimagine, REorganize, REdefine REunite the GOP and the Conervative movement in America Trumpism is on the March..Corvinus , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 11:15 pm GMT@Crazy Horse "It seems that you don't even have the decency to admit that the Impeachment was nothing but a Deep State orchestrated circus or more accurately farce actually unbelievably promoting the NeoNazi State of Ukraine as our "ally" who were fighting the evil Rooskies on our behalf."Corvinus , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 11:17 pm GMTWhy are you spreading Fake News?
"Why would it be in the interest of the American people to get involved in a proxy war with Russia?"
I never directly nor indirectly made any comment about this situation. Pray tell, are you a Russian troll?
"Talk about being low life sniffling scum they embrace John Bolton the epitome of Neocon subversion as an "ally"."
Why not let him, the Bidens, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Guiliani, and Parnas have the opportunity to speak before the Senate if it was the "perfect call"? What does Trump have to hide?
Furthermore, do you support any president digging up dirt on a political rival while in office by way of a proxy?
@Sulu "The Democrats swung and missed."anastasia , says: Show Comment February 5, 2020 at 11:23 pm GMTActually, democracy swung and missed. But there are over two dozen investigations taking place relating to Trump and his associates, and more information will be coming about the Ukraine fiasco.
"The Democrats simply can't accept that their annotated one (Hillary) was just not Presidential timber, but many voting Americans could see it."
Actually, she won the popular vote. But I do agree that she was, along with Trump, not "presidential timber".
"You lost in 2016 and you will lose the Presidency in 2020 "
I didn't run. Moreover, I'm an educated white married man who makes his own decisions about politics, race, and culture. You?
What this impeachment hoax so rawly exposes is that the politicians who brought on the impeachment and voted in favor of it (and that includes Romney) think very little, in fact, nothing about what Joe Biden and his son did. They think it was perfectly OK. What that should tell everyone is that they too would do (if they haven't already) the same thing given the opportunity as Congressmen, Senators, a Vice President, or President. They would fill their pockets and the pockets of their families given the same opportunity. People should reflect on that next time these people run for office.Crazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment February 6, 2020 at 12:25 am GMT@Corvinus Russian troll? My question is are you a moron? You don't have to answer because the question is rhetorical.Crazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment February 6, 2020 at 12:40 am GMTSeems anyone who disagrees with dipshits like you must be "agents of Putin Inc". McCarthy would be sooo proud of brain dead assholes like you and to answer your question. NO!
Now go fuck yourself.
@Virgile They lost whatever credibility they had by rigging the primary and accusing anyone that disagreed with the Queen of the Damned that they must be a Russian Troll or Agent. Corvinus perfectly epitomizes this idiocy.Crazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment February 6, 2020 at 12:46 am GMT@Corvinus "Won" the popular vote is a consolation prize in a presidential election. Besides that's questionable due to the fact she "won" 1) in states that used Soros owned Smartmatic Voting Machines 2) reported votes that far exceeded the number eligible voters registered. For instance LA County reported that 145% of eligible voters "voted" in the last general election.danand , says: Show Comment February 6, 2020 at 12:52 am GMT"includes Romney) think very little, in fact, nothing about what Joe Biden and his son did."
Anastasia, it's not disputed that Romney has a least one close associate who worked with Hunter, but actually in the Ukraine, at Burisma; but I don't believe that's Romney's angle here.
I think Romney is setting up to run 3rd party for President. Of course the objective will not be to become the next president: it will be to take out Trump, and make possible a Bloomberg victory. I would guess Romney will hold off announcement as long as possible to ensure maximum chaos. Doesn't even need to make all the state ballots to achieve "victory".
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Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Ian2 , Feb 6 2020 20:02 utc | 65
It should be clear on what the fight is really about in the US. It's about stopping the rise of socialism. Regardless of party affiliation, the elites know what the populace wants and are desperately trying to stop it. I refuse to accept that the Democrats have no idea what they're doing.I honestly can't see Sanders getting the nomination with all the corruption openly being displayed. I would be pleasantly surprised if Sanders did manage to get it, but he still have to deal with the ELECTORAL COLLEGE (EC). The Electors have the final say. Yes, one can point out that some States have laws forcing Electors to vote what the populace wants, but that is being challenged in court. The debate on whether such laws are unconstitutional or not, remains to be seen. It's too late now to deal with the EC for this election, but people need to be more active in politics at the State level as that's where Electors are (s)elected.
IF Sanders is genuine then he should prepare to run as an independent just to get the EC attention.
ben , Feb 6 2020 22:01 utc | 79
RR @ 14;
Everything in the U$A today, is driven by the unofficial Party of $, and it's reach transcends both Dems & repubs. It's cadre is the majority of the D.C. "rule makers", so we get what they want, not what "we the people" want or need.They own the banks, MSM media, and even our voting systems.
IMO, to assume one party is to blame for conditions in the U$A is a bit naive.
Question is, can anything the masses do, change the system? Or is rank and file America just along for the ride?
I'm assuming us peons will get what the party of $ wants this November also.
P.S. If any blame is given, it needs to go to the American public, because " you get the kind of Gov. you deserve" through your inactions...
It's a lot like living, death is certain, but until that occurs, I'll move forward trying to mitigate current paradigms.
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Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Bubbles , Feb 6 2020 22:16 utc | 81
As for being to the left of Clinton, so was Benito Mussolini. I don't see that as a meaningful description.Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 6 2020 21:38 utc | 76
Spinner for the new / coming fascist order Mr. Gruff?Clinton and trump may be competing for the Title of who is the greatest example of Mussolini's fascist doctrine, but Clinton isn't in the White House. Trump's posture at his rallies, the essence of said rallies, the message delivered at said rallies, his subservience to far right dictator ideology, all scream Mussolini wannabe working the disgruntled crowd who need a Messiah to lead them to the next level of the American dream, that ain't gonna happen.
America's rich love them the labor of po folk in foreign lands and trump is nothing more than a Judas Goat.
AshenLight , Feb 7 2020 0:44 utc | 103
@ Posted by: Bubbles | Feb 6 2020 22:16 utc | 81For my money, the correct Trump analog from Italian politics is Berlusconi, not Mussolini.
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Feb 04, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Furthermore, first generation immigrants don't want to replicate their culture, they want the American dream. Their grandchildren might want to "identify" as hispanic, etc., but not their parents or grandparents. Identity politics only plays in the white middle classes.
Posted by: walrus | 02 February 2020 at 04:57 PM
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Feb 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Roger Casement , 4 hours ago link
Bloomberg is as big a swamp lizard as Soros, and hates America at least as much. That's not his loot he's using to buy our representatives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/politics/michael-bloomberg-democrats-donate.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_300
Look as these gangsters. Michael Bloomberg is on the list. So is Tom Steyer and many psychopaths with bigger egos.
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Feb 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Templar X , 3 hours ago link
The Deep State Democrats aren't ready to go full communist yet, so they have, once again, rejected Jewish communist Bernie Sanders, only to replace him with an extreme leftist, globalist, gun-grabbing, billionaire, warmonger, *** from NYC.
This is the Democrats' Hillary Clinton candidate of 2020, a guy with very similar positions to Hillary Clinton, plus the billionaire status.
Political positions of Michael Bloomberg
Bloomberg has been a registered Democrat for most of his life. He is regarded as socially liberal or progressive on multiple issues, supporting abortion rights, same-sex marriage, strict gun control measures, environmentalism and a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. On economics and foreign policy issues, Bloomberg has tended towards a moderate stance. He opposed a timeline for withdrawal from the Iraq War , and criticized those who favored one. Economically, he supports government involvement in issues such as public welfare while being strongly in favor of free trade and being pro-business, describing himself as a fiscal conservative because he balanced the New York City's budget. [75] He is concerned about climate change and has touted his mayoral efforts to reduce greenhouse gases . [76] Bloomberg has been criticized for not allowing many emergency officials who responded to the September 11, 2001, attacks to attend the tenth anniversary observation of that day. [77] He was also at odds with many around the U.S. for not inviting any clergy to the ceremony marking the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. [78]
Social issues
Bloomberg supports abortion rights, stating, "Reproductive choice is a fundamental human right and we can never take it for granted. On this issue, you're either with us or against us." He has criticized " pro-choice " politicians who support " pro-life " candidates. [79]
Bloomberg supports governmental funding for embryonic stem cell research, calling the Republican position on the issue "insanity". [80] He supports same-sex marriage with the rationale that "government shouldn't tell you whom to marry." [81]
Bloomberg supports the strict drug laws of New York City. He has stated that he smoked marijuana in the past, and was quoted in a 2001 interview as saying "You bet I did. I enjoyed it."... In December 2019, Bloomberg came out in favor of marijuana decriminalization and allowing states to legalize it without federal intervention. [86] ...
... In regard to the global War on Terrorism including Iraq he said, "It's not only to protect Americans. It's America's responsibility to protect people around the world who want to be free."...
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Feb 01, 2020 | www.unz.com
onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment January 31, 2020 at 1:37 pm GMT
So they bump off Trump. So what?Bro43rd , says: Show Comment January 31, 2020 at 2:03 pm GMTTrump was never going to "drain the swamp". I knew this back in 2015 when he started to campaign: http://onebornfree-mythbusters.blogspot.com/2015/08/do-you-suffer-from-dictator-syndrome.html
When/where did he ever talk about reducing the Federal government to its original constitutional functions? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about re-enforcing the Bill of Rights on the Feds? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about getting rid of the income tax and the IRS? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about getting rid of the FBI, the CIA, the Federal Reserve, the NSA, the FDA, the CDC, the EPA [all unconstitutional] etc.etc. etc. ad infinitum? Never, that's when.
He's just another in a long line of big-mouthed, self-important scam artists – always, was, and always will be.
I feel sorry for the naive individuals who were fooled, and those who continue to be fooled. Maybe at least some of them have now learned a valuable lesson.
Regards, onebornfree
@onebornfreeTucker , says: Show Comment January 31, 2020 at 2:20 pm GMT
You are correct that orange man was a manchurian candidate. But I still felt good giving the ptb a good poke in the eye.@TG I said over a year ago, around the time this Orange Cuck Master gave that SOTU speech and reversed almost every policy promise he made to his 63 million supporters on his #1 most important issue, i.e., the border wall, deporting illegals, ending DACA on day one, drastically reducing legal immigration – which is even more destructive to the future of the GOP to win any more elections than is illegal immigration, the whole package that got people off their sofas and down to the polls to vote for him – that it was obvious to me that the globalist deep state had finally gotten their hands on some kind of leverage over him and had finally put their dog collar around his Orange lying neck.Was it related to Jeffrey Epstein? Who knows. I'm sure it is possible, with the way degenerate behavior seems to now run amok within the super rich and elitist circles. Heck, the morals of the entire country have pretty much descended into the sewer these days.
I think we are in the last days of this empire's history. I see no White knight waiting in the wings who will ride to the rescue, and if one did emerge – only half of the country would support them and the other half of totalitarian, sexual and moral degenerates would want to kill him.
What we need is a collapse and breakup of America.
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Feb 01, 2020 | off-guardian.org
In what is happening right now around the Bernie Sanders camp and the Elizabeth Warren camp, there is an opportunity for these supposed ResistanceTM-people to step up their game significantly.
After all, in this moment, the anti-Berners are certainly stepping up their own game. The problem is that there is a large asymmetry here: it is a lot easier to take someone like Bernie down than it is to build him up, in part because the former can rely on every aspect of the system, from call-out culture and Title IX-type methods to the most nefarious elements of the Deep State, while the latter has to actually confront these elements for a change.
... ... ... 1. What's going on right now with Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton is the beginning of sticking the knife back into Bernie's back. These two played a major role in doing that in 2016, and now they're getting the band back together again. Okay, that's no mystery.
The real question is, What are Bernie supporters and those who (one way or another) support the Democrats, going to do about it? When and if Warren and Clinton succeed in taking Bernie down–and of course Biden and the Obamas are onboard for this, as well–will Democrats (and Dem-supporting "leftists," etc.) be so blinded by TDS that they'll just say, "Oh well, we still have to vote for " Warren, Biden, etc.?
I think this runs parallel to what some have said about "letting the CIA help with the impeachment"–it's truly delusional, reactionary stuff. Likewise, people getting in a huff because "Bernie called her a liar on national television." No problem, apparently, that Warren first called Bernie a liar. Even more, no problem that Warren's whole life and career is based on a lie–a lie that, even now, she justifies with bullshit about how she "just loves her family so much." (Of course, with only a very few exceptions, I find the Democratic Party–and the Republican Party–completely unacceptable anyway. They are both steering media for capitalist power and money. However, unlike my leftist friends who presently justify supporting the Democrats, in impeachment and in re-taking the White House, "because they are the lesser evil," I argue that the Democrats are the greater evil, the "best representatives" of the current form of capitalism, that the Republicans are in at least some cases the lesser evil, and that Trump is something different from either one.)
2. Accordingly, I think a Trump/Sanders election would be a very good thing. You may know that I have been writing a long series of articles I have two basic reasons for hoping Sanders can get the nomination and that there could be a Trump/Sanders election: i. For Sanders to get the nomination there will have to be a very strong, dedicated, and focused movement, which will essentially have to defeat the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party and in whatever one wants to call the agglomeration of power mechanisms that form the establishment and the State. Sanders will have to do what Trump did with the Republican Party in 2016, except with Sanders and the power structures he will be up against (and with which he is more compromised than Trump ever was), this will be much, much harder. I really don't think it can happen -- and we're seeing major moves in this effort toward eliminating Bernie just in the week that has passed since I started writing this. However, this does mean that, if Bernie can build (much further) and lead the movement to seriously address these power structures,
ii. Despite what you and many others say and (I feel) are a bit too desperate to think, Sanders does have some things in common with Trump, at least thematically -- and a lot of my arguments in my articles have to do with the importance of these themes being out there, in a way that they never would have been with any other Republican, Hillary Clinton or any of the other current frontrunners besides Sanders, and any of the other media with the very important exceptions of Tucker Carlson, Steve Hilton, and perhaps a couple others on Fox News (perhaps Laura Ingram) -- and this is not only something that the anti-Trumpers absolutely hate, they hate it so much that they can't even think about it.
That is, Trump and Sanders have in common that they 1) profess that they want to do things that improve the lives of ordinary working people, and 2) profess that they want to draw back militarism.What I emphasize is that these terms would not even be on the table if it weren't for Trump -- and yes, to some extent if it weren't for Bernie, but there is a way in which Bernie can only be out there at all because Trump has put these things on the table.
Rhys Jaggar ,
The thing you are failing to see here is that Trump did nothing particularly special last time: the Deplorables had simply had enough shit over enough years that their bullshitometers were fully sensitised.So they listened to all the Deep State crap and said: 'Screw You! We're all gonna vote Trump and piss on your friggin' parade!'
They did not think all that deeply, they just were absolutely adamant about what they DID NOT WANT.
And Trump just said: 'I understand!'
The words 'I understand' are dynamite in politics. They are even more dynamite if it is said in a roundabout way, but the meaning is crystal clear to the target audience.
If Sanders wants to win, he has to prove to Main Street America that 'HE UNDERSTANDS!'
He will not win speaking down to them, telling them he knows what is best for them.
They have had two generations of that and are absolutely sick and tired of it.
The way to victory for any US Presidential candidate in 2020 is showing that they understand, they care enough to DO SOMETHING TO HELP and they have the savvy NOT TO GET PUT ON A SPIKE BY THE DEEP STATE!
Seamus Padraig ,
Sanders will have to do what Trump did with the Republican Party in 2016, except with Sanders and the power structures he will be up against (and with which he is more compromised than Trump ever was), this will be much, much harder. I really don't think it can happen
I agree. For one thing, Bernie is no Trump; he's just not a fighter. Bernie is weak. They already defrauded him once back in 2016, and he didn't care. He went ahead and endorsed the woman who cheated him, and he even spent months criss-crossing the country stumping for her! Have we seen the merest scrap of evidence this year that Bernie finally plans to take the gloves off? No, we haven't. He's a lot like Jeremy Corbyn in that regard, and just like Jeremy Corbyn, I predict he will be defeated–not so much by the voters as by 'his own' party.
but does anyone think there is a shortage of obnoxious jerks around Warren and Biden?
Just one little word should suffice: Hunter!
I think you'll find that this work is not going to be nearly so easy as what has passed for "resistance" among the anti-Trump crowd thus far.
What has passed for "resistance" since 2016 is this:
1.) Working for the government for a while to sabotage Trump.
2.) Then, when you get found out and fired by him, getting a multi-million dollar contract to write some 'tell-all' book about how evil/stupid (take your pick) your ex-boss was.
3.) Then getting invited onto The View to promote it and prattle on about how you answer to some "higher calling" so that your serial violations of the law don't matter–as opposed to, say, Trump's serial violations of decorum, which obviously merit impeachment.
That's exactly what "resistance" means to these wankers, and that's one reason I am proud to say that I am not a part of it.
lundiel ,
America's most dangerous president was, imo, Obama. Trump has nothing on him, apart from his delusions over Israel, Trump has tried, and failed, to exercise control over the security state. Obama worked with the state while he mesmerised us with stunning speeches about equality and democracy as he signied off on regime change and assassinations.
Should she ever run, Michelle would be at least as dangerous. The Obamas can make people believe that they are 'on their side'.Antonym ,
Bernie is a nice guy – too nice: no match for the shark pools from Fairfax county, Lower Manhattan or the Clinton clan . The 2016 DNC candidate selection revelations proved this.The only untainted strong Democratic candidate is Tulsi Gabbard, but she has all Establishments against her.
wardropper ,
I'd go further and say that the Americans can't win, whoever is leading them.
The pool from which they make their selections was poisoned long ago.
And it makes me very sad to say that.
Our godless society is overflowing with people who long for moral leadership, but who can't find it in today's Washminster.
Personal pursuit of a decent inner life is always an option, but Washington and Westminster are addicted to the other kind – the moneyed surface of life.
The way things are right now, it's extremely hard to say how a bridge from one kind to the other could possibly be built, but I keep lookingpaul ,
Sanders is just another irrelevant mediocrity.Fair dinkum ,
Since Reagan's Presidency, all US elections have been about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The ship may be sinking slowly, but the outcome will be the same.Gall ,
I'd say it was long before Ronnie got elected to office. Remember it was Carter and Zyb who got involved in the imperial quick sand of Afghanistan (mixing metaphors here) that is after being run out of 'Nam by a bunch of angry natives who had gotten tired of America "being a force for good" by reining "freedom and democracy" on them from the bomb bays of B 52s which I think is going to a be similar situation to what will soon happen in Iraq if we dawdle too long.Elections have in reality become all pomp with no circumstance. Flip a coin and it always comes up heads. It's a stacked deck that public are asked to play every two years thinking the odds are in their favor when it never really is. Might as well head to Vegas following the dusty trail of Hunter S Thompson.
Charlotte Ruse ,
The day FDR dumped Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman the US was f–ked.Seamus Padraig ,
That phase is over. Now that the Titanic's going down, it's no longer about rearranging any deck chairs, but about fighting over the life boats!Charlotte Russe ,
It's not all that complicated Obama laid the groundwork ensuring Bernie's defeat when he interfered in deciding who would Chair the DNC. Tom Perez was Obama's pick. Bernie wanted Keith Ellison. Perez guaranteed neoliberal centrist Dems would maintain control. Tom Perez didn't disappoint– his nominations for the 2020 Democratic Convention standing committees are a like a who's who of centrism. Most of the folks on this "A list" would fit quite nicely in the Republican Party.milosevic ,
threaten to abandon the Dems to start a Workers Third Partyactually doing so, would accomplish vastly more than just "threatening", unless anybody is really hoping for a remake of Hope and Change, which would change nothing except the specific flavour of Identity Politics secret sauce disguising the foul taste of neoliberal fascism.
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Jan 31, 2020 | www.youtube.com
Karinda Tiweyang , 6 days ago🤔 If she doesn't want to be called a liar, on national TV, she should stop lying, on national TV.
Flagrus , 1 week ago"Sexist, not SEXY, sexist" hahahhaha why was this necessary. Still funny af.
That moment when a fox News treats Bernie fairer and more honest than his own party.
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.youtube.com
Impeachment distracting from the real scandal we should be focusing on: the Bidens.
Marie Si , 1 week agoJoe Biden loves corruption almost as much as he loves kids jumping on his lap.
Freda Rounthwaite , 1 week agoThe Democrats are never prosecuted or held accountable for their crimes and corruption.
ubon11 , 1 week agoYou've hit the nail on the head with every single word you've said Tucker. Thank you for staying true to real journalism.
Puffin Vapor , 1 week ago (edited)It's too bad that only half the country will ever hear this.
L P , 1 week agoThis is just a part of the "Swamp" President Trump has talked about. Funneling money to family members of elected officials is so prevalent that they don't even see a problem, it's just business as usual.
Kelly T , 1 week agoWhat's in your wallet? Oh, it's Biden's hand..
Lynn Jacobs , 2 days ago"It's a hostage tape." Laughed out loud. Love Tucker
ultraflem , 3 days agoJoe Biden is creepy, corrupt, and dishonest -- the exact opposite of Bernie Sanders.
Carl Worsoe , 1 week ago"My instincts tell me the Democrats don't want to get rid of Plugs (Biden) on the corruption angle because then they're all exposed to it." - Rush Limbaugh
No worries Mate , 1 week agoI wonder if Chuck shummers daughter and her wife got money from Ukraine like piglosi Kerry and the bidens 🇺🇸
QUÉBEC FLAT , 1 week agoBiden crime family!
Elazar de Lusignan M. , 1 day agoColonel Sanders : " Joe Biden is a very decent man" !!! Comming from the mouth of the Communist who wants to put YOU in Goulags...It makes perfect sense !
James Williams , 3 days agoSo Uncle Joe is a front man for the credit card industry? Good job Joe! Millions of Americans are being harassed by collection agencies.
Emanuel Terzian , 1 week agoJoe Biden is a friend of mine and he's a really nice guy ... I love my husband or wife he/she's a really nice person as the ER staff bandages their wounds ... hmm got it
Sallyanne Deegan , 1 week agoTucker has been the widest eye opener ever in this 3 year saga of going after the greatest U S President of my lifetime and counting
David Price , 5 days agoDEMS react with disbelief when called on the table for the ©BUSINESS AS USUAL CORRUPT PRACTICES... Years of getting the system to fill their pockets ILLEGAL
smoothtwh , 2 days agoThe Bidens are crooks, they need convicting and jailing..
WoodBeast , 2 days agoThe impeachment is to protect ALL the Corruption. The Ukraine was a hotbed for big $$$!!
Adam M , 2 days agoPelosi too Google 60 minutes steve kroft pelosi credit card insider trading
at best joe's son was being used to get a conncetion to the vp and at worst hunter was running a drug ring
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Jan 27, 2020 | www.youtube.com
Bolton's tell-all book leaks during Senate trial. #FoxNews
Michael Harvey , 2 days agoMitt Romney is a joke.
Stephen C , 1 day agoJohn Bolton wants war everywhere to line his pockets with money.
Citizen Se7en , 2 days agoThe "right" gets the left, but doesn't agree with them. The "left" doesn't understand the "right".
Jack Albright , 2 days ago"Bolton's resignation was one of the highlights of the president's first term." Truer words have never been spoken.
Ragnar Lothbrok , 3 days agoThis story is also called "the scorpion and the frog".
Stratchona , 1 day agoJohn Bolton should be given a helmet and a gun and sent to the next war. Let's see how he likes it.
Jaret Glenn , 2 days agoTrump.." I don't know John Bolton,never met him,don't know what he does."
Regan Orr , 2 days agoTime to investigate Romney's son working for the oil company in the Ukraine.
Marjo , 2 days ago (edited)Romney's Holy Underwear is Cutting off the Blood Supply to his Deep St Brain!
Shara Kirkby , 3 days agoI never liked Bolton. I sensed he was out for himself, at anyone's expense. War monger too. He had many people fooled.
David Dorrell , 1 day ago (edited)Bolton wants war anywhere and forever!
Olivier Bolton , 2 days agoFrickin' Globalist peckerwoods. John Bolton and his pal, Mitt Romney.
Max Liftoff , 2 days agoBolton wanted war so he got the boot...the fact he brings out his book now just looks like vengean$$
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ , 1 day ago2:30 Because Bolton never served in the military he truly passionately loved war :)) LMAO Tucker nailed it.
j abe , 3 days agoThe left's championing of John Bolton is further proof that TDS has made their minds turn to sludge.
Mark Whitley , 2 days agoCan someone expaine to me how mit romney is still geting votes from ppl
Tim Fronimos , 2 days agoBolton is a war mongering narcissist that wanted his war, didn't get it, & is now acting like a spoilt child that didn't get his way & is laying on the floor kicking & screaming!
newuserandhiscrew 22 , 2 days agoRegarding John Bolton's book, is this the first book that he's colored. just curious
Brittany Ward , 1 day agoEveryone: Bolton: "take me in oh tender woman, take me in for heaven's sake"
I can't fathom that people actually believe everything the media says!
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Jan 31, 2020 | off-guardian.org
1. What's going on right now with Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton is the beginning of sticking the knife back into Bernie's back. These two played a major role in doing that in 2016, and now they're getting the band back together again. Okay, that's no mystery.
The real question is, What are Bernie supporters and those who (one way or another) support the Democrats, going to do about it? When and if Warren and Clinton succeed in taking Bernie down–and of course Biden and the Obamas are onboard for this, as well–will Democrats (and Dem-supporting "leftists," etc.) be so blinded by TDS that they'll just say,
"Oh well, we still have to vote for " Warren, Biden, etc.?I think this runs parallel to what some have said about "letting the CIA help with the impeachment"–it's truly delusional, reactionary stuff. Likewise, people getting in a huff because "Bernie called her a liar on national television." No problem, apparently, that Warren first called Bernie a liar. Even more, no problem that Warren's whole life and career is based on a lie–a lie that, even now, she justifies with bullshit about how she "just loves her family so much." Indeed, Hillary's intervention in the following days was very likely intended to take attention away from Warren's attack on Sanders, as well as, of course, to once again put HRC out there as the potential savior at the convention.
It seems to me that the lesson here is that, if Bernie doesn't get the nomination, no other candidate (from among the frontrunners) is acceptable, especially because of the role they will have played in taking down Bernie and his movement.
I have two basic reasons for hoping Sanders can get the nomination and that there could be a Trump/Sanders election:
i. For Sanders to get the nomination there will have to be a very strong, dedicated, and focused movement, which will essentially have to defeat the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party and in whatever one wants to call the agglomeration of power mechanisms that form the establishment and the State. Sanders will have to do what Trump did with the Republican Party in 2016, except with Sanders and the power structures he will be up against (and with which he is more compromised than Trump ever was), this will be much, much harder. I really don't think it can happen -- and we're seeing major moves in this effort toward eliminating Bernie just in the week that has passed since I started writing this. However, this does mean that, if Bernie can build (much further) and lead the movement to seriously address these power structures, and even beat them in some significant ways, then something tremendous will have been accomplished -- "the harder they come, the harder they fall," or at least I hope so. ii. Despite what you and many others say and (I feel) are a bit too desperate to think, Sanders does have some things in common with Trump, at least thematically -- and a lot of my arguments in my articles have to do with the importance of these themes being out there, in a way that they never would have been with any other Republican, Hillary Clinton or any of the other current frontrunners besides Sanders, and any of the other media with the very important exceptions of Tucker Carlson, Steve Hilton, and perhaps a couple others on Fox News (perhaps Laura Ingram) -- and this is not only something that the anti-Trumpers absolutely hate, they hate it so much that they can't even think about it.That is, Trump and Sanders have in common that they 1) profess that they want to do things that improve the lives of ordinary working people, and 2) profess that they want to draw back militarism.
What I emphasize is that these terms would not even be on the table if it weren't for Trump -- and yes, to some extent if it weren't for Bernie, but there is a way in which Bernie can only be out there at all because Trump has put these things on the table.
A lot of blowback against my articles has been against my argument that getting these terms and the discourse around them on the table is very important, a real breakthrough, and a breakthrough that both clarifies the larger terms of things and disrupts the "smooth functioning" (I take this from Marcuse) of the neoliberal-neoconservative compact around economics and military intervention.
Okay, maybe I'm right about this importance, maybe I'm not -- that's an argument I've dealt with extensively in my articles and that I'll try to deal with definitively in further writing -- but certainly a very important part of not letting Sanders be taken down by the other frontrunners (and HRC, and other nefarious forces, with Warren playing a special "feminist" and Identity Politics role here -- a role that does nothing to help, and indeed does much to hurt, ordinary working people of all colors, genders, etc.) will be to further sharpen the general understanding of the importance of these themes.
Significantly, there is a third theme which has emerged since the unexpected election of Donald Trump -- unexpected at least by the establishment and the nefarious powers (though they were thinking of an "insurance policy"); on this theme, I don't know that Sanders can do much -- working with the Democratic Party, he is too implicated in this issue, and he does not have whatever "protection" Trump has here.
What I am referring to are those nefarious powers behind the establishment and the ruling class, and that have taken on a life of their own -- I don't mind calling this the Deep State, but one can just think about the "intelligence community" and especially the CIA.
Whatever -- the point is that Trump has had to call them out and expose them in ways that they obviously do not like, and also his agenda of a world where the U.S. gets along well-enough with China and Russia at least not to risk WWIII, or, perhaps more realistically, not to tip the balance of things such that Russia goes completely over to a full alliance with China, a "Eurasian Union," which both Putin and Xi have spoken about, is not to their liking.
Whether Sanders would call out these nefarious factors if he were in a position to do so, I don't know -- I don't have great confidence that he would -- but it is also the case that he is not in a position to do so, these powers can easily dispose of Sanders in ways that they haven't been able to, so far, with Trump.
If one does think these themes are important, especially the first two (with further discussion reserved regarding the powers-behind-the-powers), then I wish that Trump-haters would open their minds for a moment and think about what it apparently takes in our social system to even begin to get these themes on the table.
In any case, regarding Sanders, the movement he is building will have to go even further with the first two themes if Sanders is nominated, and at least go some distance in taking on the third theme. This applies even more if Sanders were to be elected. (This is where you might take a look at the 1988 mini-series, A Very British Coup -- except that how things go down in the U.S. will not be so "British.") Here again, though, if Sanders is to build a movement that can openly address these questions, this will be tremendous, a great thing.
So this is it in a nutshell: If Sanders were to be nominated, then there is the possibility, which everyone ought to work to make a reality, that we could have an election based around the questions, What can be done to improve the lives of ordinary working people?, and, What can be done to curb militarism and end the endless interventions and wars?
Antonym ,
Bernie is a nice guy – too nice: no match for the shark pools from Fairfax county, Lower Manhattan or the Clinton clan . The 2016 DNC candidate selection revelations proved this.The only untainted strong Democratic candidate is Tulsi Gabbard, but she has all Establishments against her.
Fair dinkum ,
Since Reagan's Presidency, all US elections have been about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The ship may be sinking slowly, but the outcome will be the same.Gall ,
I'd say it was long before Ronnie got elected to office. Remember it was Carter and Zyb who got involved in the imperial quick sand of Afghanistan (mixing metaphors here) that is after being run out of 'Nam by a bunch of angry natives who had gotten tired of America "being a force for good" by reining "freedom and democracy" on them from the bomb bays of B 52s which I think is going to a be similar situation to what will soon happen in Iraq if we dawdle too long.Elections have in reality become all pomp with no circumstance. Flip a coin and it always comes up heads. It's a stacked deck that public are asked to play every two years thinking the odds are in their favor when it never really is. Might as well head to Vegas following the dusty trail of Hunter S Thompson.
Charlotte Russe ,
It's not all that complicated Obama laid the groundwork ensuring Bernie's defeat when he interfered in deciding who would Chair the DNC. Tom Perez was Obama's pick. Bernie wanted Keith Ellison. Perez guaranteed neoliberal centrist Dems would maintain control. Tom Perez didn't disappoint– his nominations for the 2020 Democratic Convention standing committees are a like a who's who of centrism. Most of the folks on this "A list" would fit quite nicely in the Republican Party.Bernie a FDR Democrat, is considered too radical by the wealthy who enjoy their Trumpian tax cuts and phony baloney stock market profits. If Trump, was just a bit less crude and not so overtly racist he'd be perfectly acceptable. Bernie, who thinks the working-poor are entitled to a living wage, healthcare, a college education, and clean drinking water is anathema to the affluent liberals who like everything just the way it is. They long for the Obama days when two wars were quietly expanded to seven, when the Wall Street crooks got a pass, and when health insurance lobbyists had their way with the federal government–the CIA was absolutely ecstatic with Obama. Trump was a bit of a speed bump for the security state, but nothing really threatening as he stuffed the pockets of the arms industry and the surveillance state with billions of working-class tax dollars. The Orangeman is having a few internecine battles with the intelligence agencies, but in the end they thoroughly had their way with the buffoon.
Bernie on the other hand, is a bit more complex. He can't be as easily attacked. Of course, the mainstream media news has all the usual Corbyn tricks in their bag, and Bernie could fall to the wayside like Corbyn if he's incapable of unapologetically fighting back. Bernie's working-class supporters want to see him give his attackers the one-two-punch and knock them out before the DNC Convention.
If Bernie manages to win numerous primaries the threat won't come from Warren or Hillary that's so 2016. The new insidious "Bernie enemy" is billionaire Bloomberg. Who is waiting in the wings If Biden takes a deep dive, Daddy Warbucks will make a play to cause a brokered convention. And that's when Perez and his Republican/Dems will takedown Bernie. Bernie's followers MUST come out swinging and not capitulate like they did last time. They have to force the issue, create a stir and threaten to abandon the Dems to start a Workers Third Party. Young progressives have this one big shot at making a difference, and they can't allow themselves to be sheepdogged into voting for another neoliberal who's
intent on maintaining the status quo. Remember, if you don't move forward you're actually moving backward into planetary ecocide.Gall ,
Hey check this out. Seems the DNC is shaking in their boots about the possibility of a third party hijacking their "base":Here's one from Whitney implying that they needn't worry because plans are in the works to install King Cyrus II as the permanent ruler with the help of his Zionist friends in the Department of Hebrew Security:
Even so it looks like Trump has decided to get rid of us noninterventionist and antiwar naysayers by fully bringing in the Dispensationalist Armageddon rapture embracing nut jobs who stand with the Talmudic genocidal racists in Israel who believe that Jesus Christ is boiling for an eternity in excrement and that his mother Mary was a whore:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52918.htm
I wish that this insanity was fantasy.
mark cutts ,
Hi Billwe have witnessed in the UK the defamation of Corbyn the ' Left Disrupter ' as he wanted to throw back the normal state of political play.
He and the well meaning Labour Party was headed off at the pass.
We have to remember that the Ruling Class have to have fall back positions and that Biden is better than Bernie as is Warren and so on.
It appears to me that the DNC also has its fallback positions too and Bernie will be chopped by the Super Delegates once again on the altar of ' electabilty ' ( read any form of Socialism – American or British is not acceptatble to the PTB ) and that is how it may end.
The battle at the moment in the UK Labour Party is which leader will back up and support extra Parliamentary action in resistance to this very right wing Tory government?
In the US the thing is the same if Bernie doesn't get the nomination.
Personally I would think that he would be a plus ( despite his foreign policy views ) but remember that Trump was a maverick Republican yet I'm not sure that Sanders would veer over to that position.
If he did then the " action " part of the steep learning curve would have to kick in to defend him and more to the point his genuinely progressive policies.
In the UK now Corbyn as the personification of ' Socialist ' threat is no longer doorstepped by the British media.
Instead the installation of a Leftish Centrist by the media ( i.e. a person that is -no threat to the existing order ) is a requirement.
This is all under the guise of a " Strong Opposition " to the right wing government.
Warren – not Biden seems to be that kind of favourite for the Ruling Class should Trump fall.
We had Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair – you in the US will get Warren.
I wish Bernie and his backers weel but I don't see it happening.
Maybe Tulsi Gabbard in another 4 years?
She and AOC are very good But this is not their time.
Not yet.
Richard Le Sarc ,
When I think of how Corbyn refused to fight back against ENTIRELY mendacious and filthy vilification as an 'antisemite', I think it might be possible that the MOSSAD told him that if he resisted he might end up, dead in his bath, like John Smith.bevin ,
Where the world weary gather to tell us how they have been let down.
Bill nails it here:
" i. For Sanders to get the nomination there will have to be a very strong, dedicated, and focused movement, which will essentially have to defeat the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party and in whatever one wants to call the agglomeration of power mechanisms that form the establishment and the State. Sanders will have to do what Trump did with the Republican Party in 2016, except with Sanders and the power structures he will be up against (and with which he is more compromised than Trump ever was), this will be much, much harder ."Anyone who believes that elections, as such, lead to great changes needs a keeper. And one who can read the US Constitution aloud for preference.
But this is not to say that at a time like this-and there have been very few of them in US history- when there is the possibility of a major candidate challenging some of the bases of the ruling ideology-albeit by doing little more than running on a platform of refurbished Progressivism- there is really no excuse for not insisting that the challenge be made and the election played out.
Sanders is not just challenging the verities of neo-liberalism but, implicitly undermining the political consensus that has supported the Warfare State since 1948.
The thing about Bernie is that he is authenticated by the enemies that he has enrolled against him and the dramatic measures that they are taking against him. Among those enemies are the Black Misleadership Class, and the various other faux progressives who are revealing themselves to be last ditch defenders of the MIC, Israel- AIPAC is now 'all in' in Iowa and New Hampshire- and the Insurance industry. It is an indication of the simplicity of Bernie's political task that no section of Congress gives more support to the Healthcare scammers than the representatives of the community most deprived by the current system. If he manages to get through to the people and persuade them that he will fight for Free Healthcare for all and other basic and long overdue social and economic reforms he can break the hold that the political parties have over a system everyone understands is designed to make the rich-who own both parties- richer and the great majority poorer. That has been the way that things have been going in the USA for at least 45 years.Gall ,
Here's the point you've missed here Bill and that Bernie had a mass appeal to the Independents that is until he sold out to the "Democratic" establishment which out of the two parties has to be the least democratic since it adopted the elitist and plutocratic Super Delegate system that can ride roughshod over the actual democratic will of the voters.Of course a cosmetic change has been made that these delegates aren't allowed to vote until the Convention but as I said it is "cosmetic" since that was originally the way this undemocratic system was set up in the "Democratic" party until Hillary Clinton used it as a psychological weapon during that sham called a "primary" to convince the hoi polo that her nomination or more accurately coronation was already a foregone conclusion.
There is also another factor that most voters are not aware of and that is the so called "Democratic" party has come up with a dictatorial "by law" that can nullify the result of the primary if the candidate isn't considered "democratic" enough by the Chairman of the DNC which in Bernie's case is very possible since technically he is an Independent running as a "Democrat". This is what Lee Camp the "Nuclear Option".
Explained here in his inimitable style:
Personally I gave up on Bernie after he sold out and shilled for that warmongering harpy Hillary who if elected would accept it as a mandate to launch WW III while ironically trying to convince us all that the "noninterventionist", "antiwar" candidate was actually the greater of the two evils.
Yeah right.
Anyway no longer have any faith in the two party system. As far as I'm concerned they can both go to hell. I've already made my choice:
https://www.markcharles2020.com
He probably needs to adjust his message more to appeal to those of us who tend to be more Libertarian and is not exactly a Russell Means but with a little help from the American Indian Movement and others can probably "triangulate" his appeal to cover a broader political spectrum. Instead of what has been traditionally known as the "left".
Greg Bacon ,
After Obama, the golden liar and mass-murderer and now Tubby the Grifter, another liar and mass-murderer, I have no desire to vote in 2020, unless Tulsi is on the ticket.If Sanders is smart and survives another back-alley mugging by the DNC and the Wicked Witch of the East, and gets the nod, he'll take on Tulsi–Mommy–as his VP.
If he does that, then Trump, Jared the Snake and Princess Bimbo will have to find another racket in 2021.Gall ,
Yeah Trumpenstein is a far cry from the Silver Tongued Devil O-Bomb-em. Even so both of them sold us a bill of goods that neither of them delivered on.But hey that's politics in America at least since Neoliberal prototype Wilson which is lie your ass off until you get elected at least.
Willem ,
Much magical thinking here.If we act now and support Sanders things will change for the better?
I surely hope so, but hope and change is soo 2008.
And if the Hildebeast enters the race, life on earth will end?
Don't think so.
Perhaps we should do this different this time. Get away from the identity politics, look what is really needed, and demand for that, not caring about 'leadership'. You know, French yellow vests style. Actually if you look a little bit outside of the MSM bubble, you see demonstrations and people demanding better treatment from the government and corporations everywhere.
The US 2020 elections, will be a nothing burger I predict. Like all elections are nothing burgers and if they are not they will fake it, or call it 'populism' that needs to be stopped (and will be stopped).
I would have voted Sanders though, if I could vote for Sanders, Similar as I would have voted for Corbyn if I could have voted for Corbyn. Voting is a tic, a habit, an addiction that is difficult to get rid of, but deadly in the end since we have nothing to vote for, except to vote for more for them at the cost of everyone else, no matter what politicians say
It's liberating to lose some of your illusions and silly reflexes, although a bit painful in the beginning as is with all addictions. The story used to 'feel' so good.
Richard Le Sarc ,
If voting changed anything, it would be outlawed.
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Jan 23, 2020 | newrepublic.com
There was a time not so long ago, before President Donald Trump's surprise decision early this year to liquidate the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, when it appeared that America's neoconservatives were floundering. The president was itching to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He was staging exuberant photo-ops with a beaming Kim Jong Un. He was reportedly willing to hold talks with the president of Iran, while clearly preferring trade wars to hot ones.
Indeed, this past summer, Trump's anti-interventionist supporters in the conservative media were riding high. When he refrained from attacking Iran in June after it shot down an American drone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared , "Donald Trump was elected president precisely to keep us out of disaster like war with Iran." Carlson went on to condemn the hawks in Trump's Cabinet and their allies, who he claimed were egging the president on -- familiar names to anyone who has followed the decades-long neoconservative project of aggressively using military force to topple unfriendly regimes and project American power over the globe. "So how did we get so close to starting [a war]?" he asked. "One of [the hawks'] key allies is the national security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend of Bill Kristol's. Together they helped plan the Iraq War."
By the time Trump met with Kim in late June, becoming the first sitting president to set foot on North Korean soil, Bolton was on the outs. Carlson was on the president's North Korean junket, while Trump's national security adviser was in Mongolia. "John Bolton is absolutely a hawk," Trump told NBC in June. "If it was up to him, he'd take on the whole world at one time, OK?" In September, Bolton was fired.
The standard-bearer of the Republican Party had made clear his distaste for the neocons' belligerent approach to global affairs, much to the neocons' own entitled chagrin. As recently as December, Bolton, now outside the tent pissing in, was hammering Trump for "bluffing" through an announcement that the administration wanted North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. "The idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on North Korea is just unfortunately not true," Bolton told Axios . Then Trump ordered the drone strike on Soleimani, drastically escalating a simmering conflict between Iran and the United States. All of a sudden the roles were reversed, with Bolton praising the president and asserting that Soleimani's death was " the first step to regime change in Tehran ." A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's "decisive action." It was Carlson who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades," Carlson said . "They still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it."
Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region -- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid .
The anti-interventionist right is freaking out. Writing in American Greatness, Matthew Boose declared , "[T]he Trump movement, which was generated out of opposition to the foreign policy blob and its endless wars, was revealed this week to have been co-opted to a great extent by neoconservatives seeking regime change." James Antle, the editor of The American Conservative, a publication founded in 2002 to oppose the Iraq War, asked , "Did Trump betray the anti-war right?"
In the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation.Their concerns are not unmerited. The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien, Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protιgι who soaked up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? -- regime change.
The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle.
Donald Trump has not dragged us into war with Iran (yet). But the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant of the Oval Office.
But there was a time when the neoconservative coalition was not so entrenched -- and what has turned out to be its provisional state of exile lends some critical insight into how it managed to hang around respectable policymaking circles in recent years, and how it may continue to shape American foreign policy for the foreseeable future. When the neoconservatives came on the scene in the late 1960s, the Republican old guard viewed them as interlopers. The neocons, former Trotskyists turned liberals who broke with the Democratic Party over its perceived weakness on the Cold War, stormed the citadel of Republican ideology by emphasizing the relationship between ideas and political reality. Irving Kristol, one of the original neoconservatives, mused in 1985 that " what communists call the theoretical organs always end up through a filtering process influencing a lot of people who don't even know they're being influenced. In the end, ideas rule the world because even interests are defined by ideas."
At pivotal moments in modern American foreign policy, the neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outrι. Jeane Kirkpatrick's seminal 1979 essay in Commentary, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," essentially set forth the lineaments of the Reagan doctrine. She assailed Jimmy Carter for attacking friendly authoritarian leaders such as the shah of Iran and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza. She contended that authoritarian regimes might molt into democracies, while totalitarian regimes would remain impregnable to outside influence, American or otherwise. Ronald Reagan read the essay and liked it. He named Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations, where she became the most influential neocon of the era for her denunciations of Arab regimes and defenses of Israel. Her tenure was also defined by the notion that it was perfectly acceptable for America to cozy up to noxious regimes, from apartheid South Africa to the shah's Iran, as part of the greater mission to oppose the red menace.
The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outrι.There was always tension between Reagan's affinity for authoritarian regimes and his hard-line opposition to Communist ones. His sunny persona never quite gelled with Kirkpatrick's more gelid view that communism was an immutable force, and in 1982, in a major speech to the British Parliament at Westminster emphasizing the power of democracy and free speech, he declared his intent to end the Cold War on American terms. As Reagan's second term progressed and democracy and free speech actually took hold in the waning days of the Soviet Union, many hawks declared that it was all a sham. Indeed, not a few neocons were livid, claiming that Reagan was appeasing the Soviet Union. But after the USSR collapsed, they retroactively blessed him as the anti-Communist warrior par excellence and the model for the future. The right was now a font of happy talk about the dawn of a new age of liberty based on free-market economics and American firepower.
The fall of communism, in other words, set the stage for a new neoconservative paradigm. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History appeared a decade after Kirkpatrick's essay in Commentary and just before the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989. Here was a sharp break with the saturnine, realpolitik approach that Kirkpatrick had championed. Irving Kristol regarded it as hopelessly utopian -- "I don't believe a word of it," he wrote in a response to Fukuyama. But a younger generation of neocons, led by Irving's son, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan, embraced it. Fukuyama argued that Western, liberal democracy, far from being menaced, was now the destination point of the train of world history. With communism vanquished, the neocons, bearing the good word from Fukuyama, formulated a new goal: democracy promotion, by force if necessary, as a way to hasten history and secure the global order with the U.S. at its head. The first Gulf War in 1991, precipitated by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, tested the neocons' resolve and led to a break in the GOP -- one that would presage the rise of Donald Trump. For decades, Patrick Buchanan had been regularly inveighing against what he came to call the neocon " amen corner" in and around the Washington centers of power, including A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom endorsed the '91 Gulf War. The neocons were frustrated by the measured approach taken by George H.W. Bush. He refused to crow about the fall of the Berlin Wall and kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait but declined to invade Iraq and "finish the job," as his hawkish critics would later put it. Buchanan then ran for the presidency in 1992 on an America First platform, reviving a paleoconservative tradition that would partly inform Trump's dark horse run in 2016.
But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen stated , "Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day."
We all know the painful consequences of the neocons' obsession with creative destruction. In his second inaugural address, three and a half years after 9/11, George W. Bush cemented neoconservative ideology into presidential doctrine: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The neocons' hubris had already turned into nemesis in Iraq, paving the way for an anti-war candidate in Barack Obama.
But it was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell. He announced his Buchananesque policy of "America First" in a speech at Washington's Mayflower Hotel in 2016, signaling that he would not adhere to the long-standing Reaganite principles that had animated the party establishment.
The pooh-bahs of the GOP openly declared their disdain and revulsion for Trump, leading directly to the rise of the Never Trump movement, which was dominated by neocons. The Never Trumpers ended up functioning as an informal blacklist for Trump once he became president. Elliott Abrams, for example, who was being touted for deputy secretary of state in February 2017, was rejected when Steve Bannon alerted Trump to his earlier heresies (though he later reemerged, in January 2019, as Trump's special envoy to Venezuela, where he has pushed for regime change). Not a few other members of the Republican foreign policy establishment suffered similar fates.
Kristol's The Weekly Standard, which had held the neoconservative line through the Bush years and beyond , folded in 2018. Even the office building that used to house the American Enterprise Institute and the Standard, on the corner of 17th and M streets in Washington, has been torn down, leaving an empty, boarded-up site whose symbolism speaks for itself.
Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the movement.
It was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell.But other neocons -- the ones who want to wield positions of influence and might -- have, more often than not, been able to hold their noses. Stephen Wertheim, writing in The New York Review of Books, has perceptively dubbed this faction the anti-globalist neocons. Led by John Bolton, they believe Trump performed a godsend by elevating the term globalism "from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics," Wertheim argued . The U.S. need not bother with pesky multilateral institutions or international agreements or the entire postwar order, for that matter -- it's now America's way or the highway.
And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian, and Iraq Warera figures like David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser, the Bolton protιgι Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate," he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review , rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is a myth."
In other words, whether the neocons themselves are occupying top positions in the Trump administration is almost irrelevant. The ideology itself has reemerged to a degree that even Trump himself seems hard pressed to resist it -- if he even wants to.
How were the neocons able to influence another Republican presidency, one that was ostensibly dedicated to curbing their sway?
One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away" from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. The event was hosted by Michael Doran, a former senior director on George W. Bush's National Security Council and a senior fellow at the institute, who wrote in The New York Times on January 3, "The United States has no choice, if it seeks to stay in the Middle East, but to check Iran's military power on the ground." Then there's Jamie M. Fly, a former staffer to Senator Marco Rubio who was appointed this past August to head Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; he previously co-authored an essay in Foreign Affairs contending that it isn't enough to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities: "If the United States seriously considers military action, it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all."
Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has popped up to warn Trump against trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000.
But there are plenty of institutions in Washington, and neoconservatism's seemingly inescapable influence cannot be chalked up to the swamp alone. Some etiolated form of what might be called Ledeenism lingered on before taking on new life at the outset of the Trump administration. Trump's overt animus toward Muslims, for example, meant that figures such as Frank Gaffney, who opposed arms-control treaties with Moscow as a member of the Reagan administration and resigned in protest of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, achieved a new prominence. During the Obama administration, Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy, claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the White House and National Security Agency.
Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world: "We're in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people." It was one of many signs that Trump was susceptible to ideas of a civilizational battle against "Islamo-fascism," which Norman Podhoretz and other neocons argued, in the wake of 9/11, would lead to World War III. In their millenarian ardor and inflexible support for Israel, the neocons find themselves in a position precisely cognate to evangelical Christians -- both groups of true believers trying to enact their vision through an apostate. But perhaps the neoconservatives' greatest strength lies in the realm of ideas that Irving Kristol identified more than three decades ago. The neocons remain the winners of that battle, not because their policies have made the world or the U.S. more secure, but by default -- because there are so few genuinely alternative ideas that are championed with equal zeal. The foreign policy discussion surrounding Soleimani's killing -- which accelerated Iran's nuclear weapons program, diminished America's influence in the Middle East, and entrenched Iran's theocratic regime -- has largely occurred on a spectrum of the neocons' making. It is a discussion that accepts premises of the beneficence of American military might and hegemony -- Hobbes's "ill game" -- and naturally bends the universe toward more war.
At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad.
As Trump takes an extreme hard line against Iran, the neoconservatives may ultimately get their long-held wish of a war with the ayatollahs. When it ends in a fresh disaster, they can always argue that it only failed because it wasn't prosecuted vigorously enough -- and the shuffle will begin again.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest and the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. @ JacobHeilbrunn
Read More Politics , The Soapbox , Donald Trump , Islamic Republic of Iran , Qassem Soleimani , Bill Kristol , Irving Kristol , David Frum , John Bolton , Norman Podhoretz , Doug Feith , Paul Wolfowitz , George W. Bush , George H.W. Bush , Ronald Reagan , Pat Buchanan , Mike Pompeo , Tom Cotton , Lindsey Graham , Rudy Giuliani , Gulf War , Iraq War , Cold War , Francis Fukuyama , Jeane Kirkpatrick
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Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Likklemore , Jan 30 2020 15:21 utc | 24
There is no shortage of people with Visions.'Greta, bonnie Prince Charles and the pirate billionaires and trillionaires'- In another post I queried how did Greta go to Davos? Silly me; Greta was invited the keynote speaker. "Stop Climate change" was this year's theme: the Vision - 'stop the natural cycle of the universe' -
Now she intends to Trademark 'How Dare You' and set up a Foundation Indeed, Greta found her sugar daddies. Adults who encourage truancy.my grandpa was a wise bloke and admonished "when politicians and do gooders are in the same room, keep an eye on your money."
William F. Engdahl names the pirates in the "Stop Climate" (cycles) Money Trail.
Follow the "Real Money" Behind the "New Green Agenda"Of note: Mark Carney upon leaving his position of Governor Bank of England will serve as global warming adviser to Boris Johnson. Who knew Carney was a scientist?[.] Davos trustees
It was no accident that Davos, the promoter of globalization, is so strongly behind the Climate Change agenda. Davos WEF has a board of appointed trustees. Among them is the early backer of Greta Thunberg, climate multi-millionaire, Al Gore, chairman of the Climate Reality Project. WEF Trustees also include former IMF head, now European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde whose first words as ECB chief were that central banks had to make climate change a priority. Another Davos trustee is outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney, who was just named Boris Johnson's climate change advisor and who warns that pension funds that ignore climate change risk bankruptcy (sic).
The board also includes the influential founder of Carlyle Group, David M. Rubenstein. It includes Feike Sybesma of the agribusiness giant, Unilever, who is also Chair of the High Level Leadership Forum on Competitiveness and Carbon Pricing of the World Bank Group. And perhaps the most interesting in terms of pushing the new green agenda is Larry Fink, founder and CEO of the investment group BlackRock.[.]
TCFD and SASB Look Closely
As part of his claim to virtue on the new green investing, Fink states that BlackRock was a founding member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). He claims, "For evaluating and reporting climate-related risks, as well as the related governance issues that are essential to managing them, the TCFD provides a valuable framework."[.]
TCFD was created in 2015 by the Bank for International Settlements, chaired by fellow Davos board member and Bank of England head Mark Carney. In 2016 the TCFD along with the City of London Corporation and the UK Government created the Green Finance Initiative, aiming to channel trillions of dollars to "green" investments. The central bankers of the FSB nominated 31 people to form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, it includes in addition to BlackRock, JP MorganChase; Barclays Bank; HSBC; Swiss Re, the world's second largest reinsurance; China's ICBC bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil, Dow Chemical, mining giant BHP and David Blood of Al Gore's Generation Investment LLC. Note the crucial role of the central banks here.[.]
Pre-alert:
Tax on Excessive garbage output is coming to your town. You will be restricted to xxxKGs/LBS annually. Your garbage will be weighed and at December 31st any excess above the permissible will attract additional tax.
Anyone see the unintended consequences?
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Jan 29, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
lizabeth Warren wrote an article outlining in general terms how she would bring America's current foreign wars to an end. Perhaps the most significant part of the article is her commitment to respect Congress' constitutional role in matters of war:
We will hold ourselves to this by recommitting to a simple idea: the constitutional requirement that Congress play a primary role in deciding to engage militarily. The United States should not fight and cannot win wars without deep public support. Successive administrations and Congresses have taken the easy way out by choosing military action without proper authorizations or transparency with the American people. The failure to debate these military missions in public is one of the reasons they have been allowed to continue without real prospect of success [bold mine-DL].
On my watch, that will end. I am committed to seeking congressional authorization if the use of force is required. Seeking constrained authorizations with limited time frames will force the executive branch to be open with the American people and Congress about our objectives, how the operation is progressing, how much it is costing, and whether it should continue.
Warren's commitment on this point is welcome, and it is what Americans should expect and demand from their presidential candidates. It should be the bare minimum requirement for anyone seeking to be president, and any candidate who won't commit to respecting the Constitution should never be allowed to have the powers of that office. The president is not permitted to launch attacks and start wars alone, but Congress and the public have allowed several presidents to do just that without any consequences. It is time to put a stop to illegal presidential wars, and it is also time to put a stop to open-ended authorizations of military force. Warren's point about asking for "constrained authorizations with limited time frames" is important, and it is something that we should insist on in any future debate over the use of force. The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs are still on the books and have been abused and stretched beyond recognition to apply to groups that didn't exist when they were passed so that the U.S. can fight wars in countries that don't threaten our security. Those need to be repealed as soon as possible to eliminate the opening that they have provided the executive to make war at will.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is unimpressed with Warren's rhetoric:
But what has Warren offered to do differently, or better? She's made no notable break with the class of experts who run our failing foreign policy. Unlike Bernie Sanders, and like Trump or Obama, she hasn't hired a foreign-policy staff committed to a different vision. And so her promise to turn war powers back to Congress should be considered as empty as Obama's promise to do the same. Her promise to bring troops home would turn out to be as meaningless as a Trump tweet saying the same.
We shouldn't discount Warren's statements so easily. When a candidate makes specific commitments about ending U.S. wars during a campaign, that is different from making vague statements about having a "humble" foreign policy. Bush ran on a conventional hawkish foreign policy platform, and there were also no ongoing wars for him to campaign against, so we can't say that he ever ran as a "dove." Obama campaigned against the Iraq war and ran on ending the U.S. military presence there, and before his first term was finished almost all U.S. troops were out of Iraq. It is important to remember that he did not campaign against the war in Afghanistan, and instead argued in support of it. His subsequent decision to commit many more troops there was a mistake, but it was entirely consistent with what he campaigned on. In other words, he withdrew from the country he promised to withdraw from, and escalated in the country where he said the U.S. should be fighting. Trump didn't actually campaign on ending any wars, but he did talk about "bombing the hell" out of ISIS, and after he was elected he escalated the war on ISIS. His anti-Iranian obsession was out in the open from the start if anyone cared to pay attention to it. In short, what candidates commit to doing during a campaign does matter and it usually gives you a good idea of what a candidate will do once elected.
If Warren and some of the other Democratic candidates are committing to ending U.S. wars, we shouldn't assume that they won't follow through on those commitments because previous presidents proved to be the hawks that they admitted to being all along. Presidential candidates often tell us exactly what they mean to do, but we have to be paying attention to everything they say and not just one catchphrase that they said a few times. If voters want a more peaceful foreign policy, they should vote for candidates that actually campaign against ongoing wars instead of rewarding the ones that promise and then deliver escalation. But just voting for the candidates that promise an end to wars is not enough if Americans want Congress to start doing its job by reining in the executive. If we don't want presidents to run amok on war powers, there have to be political consequences for the ones that have done that and there needs to be steady pressure on Congress to take back their role in matters of war. Voters should select genuinely antiwar candidates, but then they also have to hold those candidates accountable once they're in office.
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Jan 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) defended her plan to pay off college loans after being confronted by a father in Iowa in an exchange that went viral.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is confronted by a father who worked double shifts to pay for his daughters education and wants to know if he will get his money back. pic.twitter.com/t2GGbAnG08
-- Eddie Donovan (@EddieDonovan) January 21, 2020The father approached Warren, a leading Democratic presidential contender, after a campaign event in Grimes.
"My daughter's getting out of school, I saved all my money, so she doesn't have any student debt. Am I going to get my money back?" the man asked Warren.
"Of course not," Warren replied.
" So, we end up paying for people who didn't save any money, then those who did the right thing get screwed, " the father told her.
He then described a friend who makes more money but didn't save up while he worked double shifts to save up to pay for his daughter's college.
The father became upset, accusing Warren of laughing.
"We did the right thing and we get screwed," he added before walking off.
In an appearance on "CBS This Morning" on Friday, Warren was asked about the exchange.
Last night, a father who saved for his daughter's college education approached @SenWarren and challenged her proposed student loan forgiveness plan. @TonyDokoupil asks the senator for her response: pic.twitter.com/jLUXPqChC6
-- CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) January 24, 2020"Look, we build a future going forward by making it better. By that same logic what would we have done? Not started Social Security because we didn't start it last week for you or last month for you," Warren said.
Pressed on whether she was saying "tough luck" to people like the father, she said "No." She then recounted how she got to go to college despite coming from a poor family.
"There was a $50 a semester option for me. I was able to go to college and become a public school teacher because America had invested in a $50 a semester option for me. Today that's not available," she said.
"We don't build an America by saddling our kids with debt. We build an America by saying we're going to open up those opportunities for kids to be able to get an education without getting crushed by student loan debt."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) campaigns in Des Moines, Iowa on Jan. 19, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
One of Warren's plans is to cancel student loans. According to her website , on her first day as president she would cancel student loan debt as well as give free tuition to public colleges and technical schools and ban for-profit colleges from getting aid from the federal government.
"I'll direct the Secretary of Education to use their authority to begin to compromise and modify federal student loans consistent with my plan to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for 95% of student loan borrowers (about 42 million people)," Warren wrote.
"I'll also direct the Secretary of Education to use every existing authority available to rein in the for-profit college industry, crack down on predatory student lending, and combat the racial disparities in our higher education system."
Sounds an awful lot like the dad above is right those that did the "right thing" are gonna get "screwed."
csmith , 1 minute ago link
mtndds , 2 minutes ago linkWarren's debt forgiveness plan will turbo-boost the increases in college costs. It is the EXACTLY backwards remedy for out-of-control college costs.
moron counter , 7 minutes ago linkWarren you bitch, I paid back my student loans responsibly by working my *** off (140k) and now you want to give others a free ride? I sure hope that I get a refund for all that money I paid back.
chelydra , 12 minutes ago linkObama did this kinds thing with housing. I got outbid by 100k on a house. The other bidder who got it didn't make his house payments so Obama restructured his loan knocking off 100k from his loan and giving him a 1% interest rate on it. He again didn't make his payments and got it restructured again but I didn't hear the terms of that one.
Imagine That , 12 minutes ago linkIf student loan debt is such a crisis, force every university to use their precious endowment funds to underwrite those loans AND let those loans get discharged in bankruptcy. Maybe then those schools would start to question whether having a dozen "Diversity Deans" each being paid $100k+ salaries is really worth the expense (among other things).
FightingDinosaur , 15 minutes ago linkA scholarship system awarding free tuition to the top 5% of college applicants (NOT biased by race, gender, etc) who apply to the U.S.'s best STEM programs, hell yes! Free tuition for future Democrat voters, f^%k that!
Centurion9.41 , 13 minutes ago linkThe pissed off dad in this story has only one person to be pissed off at: himself, for being stupid. Understand something about college degrees: 90% of them, including majors like accounting, are not worth the paper they are printed on. Anyone who works double shifts to pay for anyone's college degree, even their own, is stupid. Look at why college costs so much: go to any state, and you'll see that 70% or more of the highest paid state employees are employed by public colleges and universities. You need to play these sons of bitches at their game, use their funny money to pay for the degree, and walk away. If you play the way these sons of bitches tell you to play, you get what you deserve.
I used their funny money to get a degree that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and walked away. I don't give a **** if the sons of bitches grab my tax refund. Why? Because I have my withholdings set up so they get next to nothing in April. It costs the sons of bitches more to print up the garnishment letter and send it to me than what they're stealing from me. Guess what I use for an address? P.O. Box (can't serve a summons to a ghost).
If you're going to do what stupid, pissed off dad did, and work double shifts, you need to be trading out of all that funny money you're being paid for those double shifts, and trading into personal economic leverage (gold first, then silver). Instead of having bedrock to build multi-generational wealth, he has a daughter with a degree in pouring coffee, and nothing else to show for it. He only has himself to blame for drinking the Kool Aid. I can grab overtime every Saturday at my job if I want it, and every last penny of that OT is traded out of funny money and into gold ASAP.
Understand the US real estate market: the only reason it did not die five years ago was because we welcomed rich foreigners to come in and buy real estate to protect their wealth. We've stopped doing that, we have an over-abundance of domestic sellers and a severe shortage of domestic buyers. It's also where history says you need to be if you want to build multi-generational wealth. Warren actually needs to go further than what she's proposing. Not only does she need to discharge 100% of those balances by EO, she also needs to refund all those tax refunds stolen under false pretenses. Anything less, and we are guaranteed, for the next 40 years, to have a real estate market and economy which resembles Japan since 1989.
Why do I buy gold? So I can play people like Warren at their game. I'll take whatever loan discharge she gives me, and have lots of leverage in reserve to take advantage of what will be a once in a lifetime real estate fire sale.
gatorengineer , 13 minutes ago linkHere's an idea...
Make those who want to be bailed out have to pay the bailout back by working every non-holiday Saturday (at the minimum wage rate) for the government and citizens (e.g who need work done around the house, take care of the elderly - in the bathroom) until the debt is paid back. AND let those who have not taken the debt relief supervise them - getting paid by the government at the same rate, minimum wage. 🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞
southpaw47 , 18 minutes ago linkFor a decent college it's between 35-70k a year.... Why? 300k a year library professors, if it weren't for tenure the problem would largely he self correcting as rntrillments drop...
Snaffew , 27 minutes ago linkMy how times have changed. My son was a college grad circa 1996. He did the JUCO thing for 1 1/2 years , worked a part time job for the duration, and picked up an A S while making the President's list. I aid, out of pocket all educational expenses while he lived at home and provided for a nice lifestyle while he was in school. As promised, he finished his education, out of state, which I paid for all along the way. 2 more years, he graduated, on the Pres list, and picked up his B S. No student debt, in his words, was one of the the greatest gifts. Today he is debt free, (so am I ), and he is a very happy , financially secure ( until the world goes upside down) mature adult. Hey Lizzie, send me a check.
Balance-Sheet , 11 minutes ago linkThey are all ignoring the real problem...the Federal mandated system of the guaranteed student loan program. Anyone with a pulse can get a guaranteed student loan, thus creating a massive rise in college admissions. The colleges are guaranteed the money for these loans, while the lender (the US gov't) is not guaranteed to be paid back by the students receiving these loans,. this created a fool proof, risk free ability for colleges and universities across the country to jack up their tuition costs at over a 5:1 ratio of income growth over the last 25 years. The problem is the program itself, students need to earn their ability to enroll in college through hard work and good grades. Currently, any moron with a high school diploma can go to college on a guaranteed student loan program and the colleges are more than willing to take on any idiot that wants to go to school despite their aspirations, work ethics, intelligence, achievements, etc. The universities have been given a blank check to expand their campuses, drastically inflate the salaries and pensions of professors and administrators of these schools all at the expense of this guaranteed "free" money from the government that only achieved an immense amount of the population going to overpriced schools in order to get a diploma in useless pursuits like african american studies, philosophy, creative writing, music, criminal justice, arts, basket weaving, etc.. The skyrocketing costs of colleges and student debt is the direct result of this miserably failed system of the guaranteed student loan. The majority of which have no business going to higher education because they don't have the aptitude, work ethic and intelligence necessary to actually receive a degree in anything that benefits the economy and themselves going forward. 30 years ago the average state college admission was roughly $4k a year for a good state school, today it is roughly $20k or far more. Meanwhile, the average income has gone up a meaningless amount. Get rid of the guaranteed student loan program and make the colleges responsible for accepting the responsibility of the loans for their students. I guarantee enrollment will decrease and costs will decline making it much more affordable for the truly responsible and aspiring student to achieve their dreams of a degree without a $250k loan needed for completion nor the lifelong strain of debt on their future incomes. The colleges are raping the system the same as all these shoestring companies take advantage of the medicaid system and give hovarounds and walking canes, and hearing aids for free because the gov't reimburses them at wildly inflated prices under some federally passed mandate. The system is the problem, eliminating the debt will only exacerbate it and cost taxpayers trillions more each and every year as "free" college will now entice every moron with a heartbeat the ability to go to outrageously priced schools with no skin in the game on the taxpayer's dime. Elizabeth Warren is an idiot....someone needs to have a sit down with her and discuss this rationale in her luxurious, state of the art TeePee.
bkwaz4 , 25 minutes ago linkWhile you are correct corrupting academics with huge payoffs is how you secure their votes and the votes of most of the 'students' for decades to come.
Any group or industry can be paid off and you might think of the system as a set of interlocking payoffs until you get out to the margins and the fringes where the cash and benefits are a lot thinner.
johnduncan78 , 25 minutes ago linkEveryone who continues to pay taxes to these neo-Bolsheviks is going to get screwed. The only alternative is to stop funding these criminals completely.
Lie_Detector , 27 minutes ago linkWhat a sorry presidential canditate! She flat out LIED about being native american to get FREE college. And now this. Where has America gone????????? Socialism sems to be what most want nowadays. It has NEVER EVER worked anywhere in the world at any time! If yoou think therwise, just name ONE countryn it has worked in ! What a lying bunch the democrats are..........................
Resist-Socialist-Dem-Lies , 24 minutes ago linkWarren Defends Plan To Cancel Student Debt
So all if us have to pay for it. Why did I have to pay for University and College in the 1970's if I wanted to further my education and now that I am older I have to foot the bill for the young people of today? Pay DOUBLE? (just to buy votes for traitors?)
I think NOT! Take your theft from the people, to buy votes of everyone from young people to illegal criminals to outright criminals in prison to dead people and resign before we decide to arrest you.
Democrats, HANG IT UP! We are NOT paying for YOUR illegitimate votes.
Lie_Detector , 22 minutes ago linkNotice too how all their "we're going to wipe out your debt!" promises never seem to include the big "endowments" of these fascist colleges that jacked up tuition 1000% over what it used to cost.
No, those creepy commie profs and their freaky administrators get to keep their big TAX FREE endowments AND their big salaries.
Big Gov by Sanders/Warren don't seem to think that's obscene.
moron counter , 27 minutes ago linkYou are absolutely correct. 45 years ago you could almost work part time and actually PAY your way through college. Today you almost need a physicians salary to pay for these OVERPRICED sewers filled with leftist propaganda.
It's obvious that Warren doesn't teach economics or even math. They weren't smart enough when they took out the loans and they are not good with paying their bills so move the goal posts to bail them out. Has anyone given the thought that maybe they shouldn't have gone to college at all. Sounds like they will all work for the government anyways.
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Jan 27, 2020 | warontherocks.com
end of history " and America's " unipolar moment ." And both camps have undergone a serious reckoning after the Afghanistan, Iraq, and forever wars, as well as the global financial crisis calling into question neoliberal economic policies -- namely, deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and austerity. Prominent foreign policy advocates have quite publicly engaged in soul-searching as they confronted these changes, and debates about the future of foreign policy abound.The emergence of a distinctively progressive approach to foreign policy is perhaps the most interesting -- and most misunderstood -- development in these debates. In speeches and articles, politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders have outlined an approach to foreign policy that does not fall along the traditional fault-lines of realist versus idealist or neoconservative versus liberal internationalist (disclosure: I have been a longtime advisor to Sen. Warren). Their speeches come alongside an increasing number of articles exploring the contours of a progressive foreign policy. Even those who might not consider themselves progressive are sounding similar themes .
From this body of work, it is now possible to sketch out the framework of a distinctively progressive approach to foreign policy. While its advocates, like those in other foreign policy camps, discuss a wide range of issues -- from climate change to reforming international institutions -- at the moment, five themes mark this emerging approach as a specific framework for foreign policy.
First, progressive foreign policy breaks the silos between domestic and foreign policy and between international economic policy and foreign policy. It places far greater emphasis on how foreign policy impacts the United States at home -- and particularly on how foreign policy (including international economic policy) has impacted the domestic economy. To be sure, there have always been analysts and commentators who recognized these interrelationships. But progressive foreign policy places this at the center of its analysis rather than seeing it as peripheral. The new progressive foreign policy takes the substance of both domestic and international economic policies seriously, and its adherents will not support economic policies on foreign policy grounds if they exacerbate economic inequality at home. For example, the argument that trade deals must be ratified on national security grounds even though they have problematic distributional consequences does not carry much weight for progressives who believe that an equitable domestic economy is the foundation of national power.
Second, progressive foreign policy holds that one of the important threats to American democracy at home is nationalist oligarchy (or, alternatively, authoritarian capitalism ) abroad. Countries like Russia and China are not simply authoritarian governments, and neither can their resurgence and assertion of power be interpreted as merely great power competition. The reason is that their economic systems integrate economic and political power. Crony/state capitalism is not a bug, it is the central feature. In a global society, economic interrelationships weaponize economic power into political power . China, for example, already uses its economic power as leverage in political disputes with other Asian countries. Its growing share of global GDP is one of the most consequential facts of the 21st century. As a result of these dynamics, progressives are also highly skeptical of a foreign policy based on the premise that the countries of the world will all become neoliberal democracies. Instead, they take seriously the risks that come from economic integration with nationalist oligarchies.
Third, the new progressive foreign policy values America's alliances and international agreements, but not because it thinks that such alliances and rules can convert nationalist oligarchies into liberal democracies. Rather, alliances should be based on common values or common goals, and, going forward, they will be critical to balancing and countering the challenges from nationalist oligarchies. Progressives are thus far more skeptical of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia and far more interested in reinforcing and deepening ties with allies like Japan -- and are concerned about the erosion of alliances like NATO from within.
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Jan 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
vk , Jan 26 2020 15:39 utc | 1
The death of the "Vital Center", an epitaph:Why red and blue America can't hear each other anymore - by Francis Fukuyama
Trailer Trash , Jan 26 2020 16:58 utc | 16
>by Francis FukuyamaNot sure why anyone would waste their time reading the nitwit who proclaimed "The End of History" to loud applause from the establishment pseudo-intellectuals. About as useful as reading Thomas Friedman.
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Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com
Western elites and their lackeys in the media despise Russian president Vladimir Putin and they make no bones about it. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. Putin has rolled back US ambitions in Syria and Ukraine, aligned himself with Washington's biggest strategic rival in Asia, China, and is currently strengthening his economic ties with Europe which poses a long-term threat to US dominance in Central Asia. Putin has also updated his nuclear arsenal which makes it impossible for Washington to use the same bullyboy tactics it's used on other, more vulnerable countries. So it's understandable that the media would want to demonize Putin and disparage him as cold-blooded "KGB thug". That, of course, is not true, but it fits with the bogus narrative that Putin is maniacally conducting a clandestine war against the United States for purely evil purposes. In any event, the media's deep-seated Russophobia has grown so extreme that they're unable to cover even simple events without veering wildly into fantasy-land. Take, for example, the New York Times coverage of Putin's recent Address to the Federal Assembly, which took place on January 15. The Times screwball analysis shows that their journalists have no interest in conveying what Putin actually said, but would rather use every means available to persuade their readers that Putin is a calculating tyrant driven by his insatiable lust for power. Check out this excerpt from the article in the Times:
"Nobody knows what's going on inside the Kremlin right now. And perhaps that's precisely the point. President Vladimir V. Putin announced constitutional changes last week that could create new avenues for him to rule Russia for the rest of his life .(wrong)
The fine print of the legislation showed that the prime minister's powers would not be expanded as much as first advertised, while members of the State Council would still appear to serve at the pleasure of the president. So maybe Mr. Putin's plan is to stay president, after all? .(wrong again)
A journalist, Yury Saprykin, offered a similar sentiment on Facebook, but in verse:
We'll be debating over how he won't leave,
We'll be guessing, will he leave or won't he.
And then -- lo! -- he won't be leaving.
That is, before the elections he won't leave,
And after that, he definitely won't leave." (wrong, a third time)( " Big Changes? Or Maybe Not. Putin's Plans Keep Russia Guessing" , New York Times )
This is really terrible analysis. Yes, "Putin announced constitutional changes last week", but they have absolutely nothing to do with some sinister plan to stay in power, and anyone who read the speech would know that. Unfortunately, most of the other 100-or-so "cookie cutter" articles on the topic, draw the same absurd conclusion as the Times , that is, that the changes Putin announced in his speech merely conceal his real intention which is to extend his time in office for as long as possible. Once again, there's nothing in the speech itself to support these claims, it's just another attempt to smear Putin.
So what did Putin actually say in his annual Address to the Federal Assembly?
Well, that's where it gets interesting. He announced changes to the social safety net, more financial assistance for young families, improvements to the health care system, higher wages for teachers, more money for education, hospitals, schools, libraries. He promised to launch a system of "social contracts" that commit the state to reducing poverty and raising standards of living. He pledged to provide healthier meals to schoolchildren, lower interest rates for first-time home buyers, greater economic support for working families, higher payouts to pensioners, raises to the minimum wage, additional funding for a "network of extracurricular technology and engineering centers". Putin also added this gem:
"It is very important that children who are in preschool and primary school adopt the true values of a large family – that family is love, happiness, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, that family is a strong bond of several generations, united by respect for the elderly and care for children, giving everyone a sense of confidence, security, and reliability. If the younger generations accept this situation as natural, as a moral and an integral part and reliable background support for their adult life, then we will be able to meet the historical challenge of guaranteeing Russia's development as a large and successful country."
Naturally, heartfelt statements like this never appear on the pages of the Times or any of the other western media for that matter. Instead, Americans are deluged with more of the same relentless Putin-psychobabble that's become a staple of cable news. The torrent of lies, libels and fabrications about Putin are so constant and so overwhelming, that the only thing of which one can be absolutely certain, is that nothing that is written about Putin in the MSM can be trusted. Of that, there is no doubt.
That said, Putin is a politician which means he might not deliver on his promises at all. That is a very real possibility. But if that's the case, then why did his former-Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, resign immediately after the speech? Medvedev and his entire cabinet resigned because they realized that Putin has abandoned the western model of capitalism and is moving in a different direction altogether. Putin is now focused on strengthening welfare state programs that lift people out of poverty, raise living standards, and narrow the widening inequality gap. And he wants a new team to help him implement his vision, which is why Medvedev and crew got their walking papers. Here's how The Saker summed it up in a recent article at the Unz Review :
"The new government clearly indicates that, especially with the nominations of Prime Minister Mishustin and his First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov: these are both on record as very much proponents of what is called "state capitalism" in Russia: meaning an economic philosophy in which the states does not stifle private entrepreneurship, but one in which the state is directly and heavily involved in creating the correct economic conditions for the government and private sector to grow. Most crucially, "state capitalism" also subordinates the sole goal of the corporate world (making profits) to the interests of the state and, therefore, to the interests of the people. In other words, goodbye turbo-capitalism à la Atlantic Integrationists!" ( "The New Russian Government" , The Saker)
This is precisely what is taking place in Russia right now. Putin is breaking away from Washington's parasitic model of capitalism and replacing it with a more benign version that better addresses the needs of the people. This new version of 'managed capitalism' places elected officials at the head of the system to protect the public from the savagery of market forces and from perennial-grinding austerity. It's a system aimed at helping ordinary people not Wall Street or the global bank Mafia.
But while the changes to Russia's economic model are significant, it's Putin's political changes that have drawn the most attention. Here's what he said:
(The) "requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of international bodies can be valid on the Russian territory only to the point that they do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution ."
What does this mean? Does it mean that Putin will not respect international law or the treaties it has signed with its neighbors? No, it doesn't, in fact, Putin has been an enthusiastic proponent of international law and the UN Security Council. He strongly believes that these institutions play a crucial role in maintaining global security, an issue that is very close to his heart. What the Russian president appears to be saying is that the rights of the Russian people and of the sovereign Russian government take precedent over foreign corporations, treaties or free trade agreements. Russia will not allow the powerful and insidious globalist multinationals to take control of the political and economic levers of state power as they've done in countries around the world. Putin further clarified this point saying:
"Russia can remain Russia only as a sovereign state. Our nation's sovereignty must be unconditional. We have done a great deal to achieve this. We restored our state's unity and overcome the situation when certain powers in the government were essentially usurped by oligarch clans. We created powerful reserves, which increases our country's stability and capability to protect (us) from any attempts of foreign pressure."
For Putin sovereignty, which is the supreme power of a state to govern itself, is the bedrock principle which legitimizes the state provided the state faithfully represents the will of the people. He elaborates on this point later in his speech saying:
"The opinion of people, our citizens as the bearers of sovereignty and the main source of power must be decisive. In the final analysis everything is decided by the people, both today and in the future."
So while there may be significant differences between Russian and US democracy, the basic principle remains the same, the primary responsibility of the government is to carry out the "will of the people". In this respect, Putin's political philosophy is not much different from that of the framers of the US Constitution. What is different, however, is Putin's approach to free trade. Unlike the US, Putin does not believe that free trade deals should diminish the authority of the state. Most Americans don't realize that trade agreements like NAFTA often include provisions that prevent the government from acting in the best interests of their people. Globalist trade laws prevent governments from providing incentives to companies to slow the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, they undermine environmental regulations and food safety laws. Some of these agreements even shield sweatshop owners and other human rights abusers from penalty or prosecution.
Is it any wonder why Putin does not want to participate in this unethical swindle? Is it any wonder why he feels the need to clearly state that Russia will only comply with those laws and treaties that "do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution"? Here's Putin again:
"Please, do not forget what happened to our country after 1991. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, .there were also threats, dangers of a magnitude no one could have imagined ever before. .Therefore We must create a solid, reliable and invulnerable system that will be absolutely stable in terms of the external contour and will securely guarantee Russia's independence and sovereignty."
So what happened following the dissolution of the Soviet Union?
The United States dispatched a cabal of cutthroat economists to Moscow to assist in the "shock therapy" campaign that collapsed the social safety net, savaged pensions, increased unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and alcoholism by many orders of magnitude, accelerated the slide to privatization that fueled a generation of voracious oligarchs, and sent the real economy plunging into an excruciating long-term depression.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz followed events closely in Russia at the time and summed it up like this:
"In Russia, the people were told that capitalism was going to bring new, unprecedented prosperity. In fact, it brought unprecedented poverty, indicated not only by a fall in living standards, not only by falling GDP, but by decreasing life spans and enormous other social indicators showing a deterioration in the quality of life ..
The number of people in poverty in Russia, for instance, increased from 2 percent to somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, with more than one out of two children living in families below poverty. The market economy was a worse enemy for most of these people than the Communists had said it would be. In some (parts) of the former Soviet Union, the GDP, the national income, fell by over 70 percent. And with that smaller pie it was more and more unequally divided, so a few people got bigger and bigger slices, and the majority of people wound up with less and less and less . (PBS interview with Joseph Stiglitz, Commanding Heights)
At the same time Washington's agents were busy looting Moscow, NATO was moving its troops, armored divisions and missile sites closer to Russia's border in clear violation of promises that were made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to move its military "one inch east". At present, there are more combat troops and weaponry on Russia's western flank than at any time since the German buildup for operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Naturally, Russia feels threatened by this flagrantly hostile force on its border. (BTW, this week, "The US is carrying out its biggest and most provocative deployment to Europe since the Cold War-era. According to the US Military in Europe Website: "Exercise DEFENDER-Europe 20 is the deployment of a division-size combat-credible force from the United States to Europe .The Pentagon and its NATO allies are recklessly simulating a full-blown war with Russia to prevent Moscow from strengthening its economic ties with Europe.) Here's more from Putin:
"I am convinced that it is high time for a serious and direct discussion about the basic principles of a stable world order and the most acute problems that humanity is facing. It is necessary to show political will, wisdom and courage. The time demands an awareness of our shared responsibility and real actions."
This is a theme that Putin has reiterated many times since his groundbreaking speech at Munich in 2007 where he said:
"We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this? ." ("Wars not diminishing': Putin's iconic 2007 Munich speech, you tube)
What Putin objects to is the US acting unilaterally whenever it chooses. It's Washington's capricious disregard for international law that has destabilized vast regions across the Middle East and Central Asia and has put world leaders on edge never knowing where the next crisis will pop up or how many millions of people will be impacted. As Putin said in Munich, "No one feels safe." No one feels like they can count on the protection of international law or UN Security Council resolutions.
Putin:
"Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life
The power vacuum in some countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa obviously resulted in the emergence of areas of anarchy, which were quickly filled with extremists and terrorists. The so-called Islamic State has tens of thousands of militants fighting for it, including former Iraqi soldiers who were left on the street after the 2003 invasion. Many recruits come from Libya whose statehood was destroyed as a result of a gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 ."
Is Putin overstating Washington's role in decimating Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan or is this a fair assessment of America's pernicious and destabilizing role in the region? Entire civilizations have been laid to waste, millions have been killed or scattered across the region to achieve some nebulous strategic advantage or to help Israel eliminate its perceived enemies. And all this military adventurism can be traced back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the triumphalist response from US powerbrokers who saw Russia's collapse as a green light for their New World Order.
Washington reveled in its victory and embraced its ability to dominate global decision-making and intervene unilaterally wherever it saw fit. The indispensable nation no longer had to bother with formalities like the UN Security Council or international law. Even sovereignty was dismissed as an archaic notion that had no place in the new borderless corporate empire. What really mattered was spreading western-style capitalism to the four corners of the earth particularly those areas that contained vital resources (ME) or explosive growth potential. (Eurasia) Those regions were the real prize.
But then something unexpected happened. Washington's wars dragged on ad infinitum while newer centers of power gradually emerged. Suddenly, the globalist utopia was no longer within reach, the American Century had ended before it had even begun. Meanwhile Russia and China were growing more powerful all the time. They demanded an end to unilateralism and a return to international law, but their demands were flatly rejected. The wars and interventions dragged on even though the prospects for victory grew more and more remote. Here's Putin again:
"We have no doubt that sovereignty is the central notion of the entire system of international relations. Respect for it and its consolidation will help underwrite peace and stability both at the national and international levels First of all, there must be equal and indivisible security for all states." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, " The Future in Progress: Shaping the World of Tomorrow, From the Office of the President of Russia)
Indeed, sovereignty is the foundational principle upon which global security rests, and yet, it is sovereignty that western elites are so eager to extinguish. Powerhouse multinationals want to erase existing borders to facilitate the unfettered, tariff-free flow of goods and people in one giant, interconnected free trade zone that spans the entire planet. And while their plan has been derailed by Putin in Syria and Ukraine, they have made gains in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. The virus cannot be contained, it can only be eradicated. Here's Putin:
"Essentially, the entire globalisation project is in crisis today and in Europe, as we know well, we hear voices now saying that multiculturalism has failed. I think this situation is in many respects the result of mistaken, hasty and to some extent over-confident choices made by some countries' elites a quarter-of-a-century ago. Back then, in the late 1980s-early 1990s, there was a chance not just to accelerate the globalization process but also to give it a different quality and make it more harmonious and sustainable in nature.
But some countries that saw themselves as victors in the Cold War, not just saw themselves this way but said it openly, took the course of simply reshaping the global political and economic order to fit their own interests.
In their euphoria, they essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organizations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, and not for all." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)
As Putin says, there was an opportunity to "make globalization more harmonious and sustainable", (perhaps, China's Belt and Road initiative will do just that.) but Washington elites rejected that idea choosing instead to impose its own self-aggrandizing vision on the world. As a result, demonstrations and riots have cropped up across Europe, right-wing populist parties are on the rise, and a majority of the population no longer have confidence in basic democratic institutions. The west's version of globalization has been roundly repudiated as a scam that showers wealth on scheming billionaires while hanging ordinary working people out to dry. Here's Putin again:
"It seems as if the elites do not see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class (but the situation) creates a climate of uncertainty that has a direct impact on the public mood.
Sociological studies conducted around the world show that people in different countries and on different continents tend to see the future as murky and bleak. This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)
True, life is harder now and it looks to get harder still, but what is Putin's remedy or does he have one? Is he going to stem the tide and reverse the effects of globalization? Is he going to sabotage Washington's plan to control vital resources in the Middle East, become the the main player in Central Asia, and tighten its grip on global power?
No, Putin is not nearly that ambitious. As he indicates in his speech, his immediate goal is to reform the economy so that poverty is eliminated and wealth is more equally distributed. These are practical remedies that help to soften capitalism and decrease the probability of social unrest. He also wants to fend off potential threats to the state by shoring up Russian sovereignty. That's why he is adding amendments to the Constitution. The objective is to protect Russia from pernicious foreign agents or fifth columnists operating within the state. Bottom line: Putin sees what's going on in the world and has charted a course that best serves the interests of the Russian people. Americans would be lucky to have a leader who did the same.
Digital Samizdat , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 8:21 am GMT
@WestcosastMiro23 , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 8:29 am GMTHe is now granted $40 billion in tax breaks to the biggest fossil fuel oligarchs–Rosneft and Gazprom. These are privatised companies that were formerly state companies in the former USSR. Instead of reversing the trend Putin has escalated privatization.
It seems you were misinformed. Rosneft and Gazprom are still state-owned, the latter mostly and the former entirely. So if indeed Putin did grant them these tax breaks, it's just one branch of the government transferring money to another branch of government–sort of like when the Social Security Administration here in the US buy bonds from the Treasury Department. It's just an accounting gimmick, not gift to 'oligarchs'. (BTW, why is it that the media never refer to Soros, Bezos or the Rockefellers as 'oligarchs'? Why only Russians?)
St-Germain , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMTFor Putin sovereignty, which is the supreme power of a state to govern itself, is the bedrock principle which legitimizes the state provided the state faithfully represents the will of the people. He elaborates on this point later in his speech saying:
"The opinion of people, our citizens as the bearers of sovereignty and the main source of power must be decisive. In the final analysis everything is decided by the people, both today and in the future."
This is what has been missing from so called US Democracy for a while now.
The present day US is a hegemony of Special Interests busy looting the place under cover their propaganda department (US MSM).
Great article, Mike Whitney. So far it's the only one I've seen that reveals a coherent hard core in what Putin seeks to achieve with a seemingly bureaucratic rejiggering of the constitution and ruling echelon. Maybe he's finally ending the humiliating indecision that has stymied Russia the past three decades: Will the country keep trying to be yet another pale copy of the financialized U.S. economic sphere, powered by dollar hegemony? Or, will it free itself from predatory corporate domination in order to duplicate the obvious success of sovereign next-door China? If your analysis is on the mark, Putin may have now found the answer to Russia's debilitating post-Soviet identity crisis.geokat62 , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 1:30 pm GMTTrump's unexpected election and the parallel rise of nationalism in docile Europe suggests that much the same crisis has now emerged within the Western empire. Will it be borderless neofeudal corporatism for the benefit of those at the top of the social pyramid or will working people regain a voice in their own government? Reading those troubled tea leaves, Putin may have picked the right moment to launch Russia on the more promising path.
The Scalpel , says: Website Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:07 pm GMTIs Putin overstating Washington's role in decimating Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan or is this a fair assessment of America's pernicious and destabilizing role in the region? Entire civilizations have been laid to waste, millions have been killed or scattered across the region to achieve some nebulous strategic advantage or to help Israel eliminate its perceived enemies.
No need to qualify the cause of this nefarious plan by referencing some nebulous objective. There was nothing nebulous about it. The plan to Remake the Middle East was clearly articulated by Richard Perle, well before the GWOT was launched, in A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm .
@TuckerFranklin Ryckaert , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:42 pm GMTSooner or later, every Bully will push the wrong opponent and wind up getting his ass stomped in the dirt.
Sad, but true. I think everyone hopes that the US pulls off some sort of last minute transformation and repentance, because the takedown would be very ugly for everyone
@geokat62 Don't forget to mention the Oded Yinon Plan, the plan to shatter all Israel's neighbors into small, dysfunctional, quarrelling statelets. See, Global Research : "Greater Israel" : The Zionist Plan for the Middle East.Desert Fox , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:52 pm GMTGod bless Putin and Russia for saving Syria from the terrorists created by the ZUS and Israel and ZBritain and ZNATO , these terrorists AL CIADA aka ISIS and all offshoots thereof were created and armed and funded to destroy the middle east for the zionist greater Israel project and all of this was brought on by the joint Israeli and ZUS attack on the WTC on 911 and blamed on the arabs.bluedog , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMTWho is the greater terrorist, the terrorists or the ones who created them.
@Sean Russia will do very well they are moving in the right direction, they are putting regulations on those that need it, and better programs for the people.Desert Fox , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 3:11 pm GMTI once read that you can start out with a strong generation and from that strong generation ever generation after will become weaker and weaker, until you end up with a generation like the U.S. has that's like clay in the hands of a master, they can't think nor even act they just follow the dictates of the master.!!!
@Old and grumpy In regards to sanctions Russia for the last 3 years has been the greatest producer and exporter of grain, and since food is the most important thing, the ZUS is pissing into the wind with sanctions on Russia.RoyJ , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 3:15 pm GMT"This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)"Huxley , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 4:01 pm GMTJeez ain't that the truth. I live in Virginia and it seems that no matter how I vote it just never changes anything. We just had big demonstrations against the stupid new gun laws our despotic governor wants to enact and from where I'm sitting it didn't make one iota of difference. The rank and file have zero to say in how they are governed But we sure get to finance it with our taxes.
@Anonymous You are delusional and have obviously spent no time in Russia. When the Pussy Riot grrrls desecrated the altar at St. Savior, Russians went ballistic, from the Patriarchs down to the blue collar diesel mechanics.Greg S. , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 4:01 pm GMTYour so-called "faith" in the US and Europe has already sold out to Globohomo completely. Most priests are gay and have been buggering the altar boys for decades. Protestant sects have lesbian bishops. Your "faithful" have not only totally surrendered to the Globohomo takeover, they now EMBRACE it proudly. "All are welcome." There is now no difference between Vatican II Catholicism and Unitarian Universalism. Western Europe is so far gone, so anti-life, there's hardly a white child left. Muslims are sharpening their machetes.
So you think there's no substance behind Orthodoxy. You are mistaken. (I'm Latin Mass Catholic, BTW)
Take 3 minutes to listen to Patriarch Kirill:
LIBERAL IDEA IS A SIN:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/CZgykarzaM4?feature=oembed
@John ChuckmanIt's only consistent with his past behavior of reining in post-Soviet Russian Oligarchs.
And there is the real reason why the "west" hates him. Because who controls the west? Who owns all of the media, owns the politicians, and controls the narrative? Our very own Oligarchs, indistinguishable from the Russian version and in fact interchangeable (borders mean nothing to them). So of course they are pissed if Putin is rolling them back over in Russia. How dare he.
Also, have you ever noticed that the word "Oligarch" is only every applied in the same sentence as "Russian?"
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Jan 27, 2020 | www.columbia.edu
Fascism and neofascism
1. THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE AND FASCISM
Fascism is the most extreme form of counterrevolution. Counterrevolution itself only emerges as a response to revolution. Nazism, for example, didn't arrive because the German people all of a sudden lost their bearings from an overdose of Wagner's operas and Nietzsche's aphorisms. It arrived at a time when massive worker's parties threatened bourgeois rule during a period of terrible economic hardship. Big capital backed Hitler as a last resort. The Nazis represented reactionary politics gone berserk. Not only could Nazism attack worker's parties, it could also attack powerful institutions of the ruling class, including its churches, media, intellectuals, parties and individual families and individuals. Fascism is not a scalpel. It is a very explosive, uncontrollable weapon that can also inflict some harm on its wielder.
Fascism emerges in the period following the great post-World War I revolutionary upsurge in Europe. The Bolsheviks triumphed in Russia, but communists mounted challenges to capitalism in Hungary, Germany and elsewhere. These revolutions receded but but their embers burned. The world-wide depression of 1929 added new fuel to the glowing embers of proletarian revolution. Socialism grew powerful everywhere because of the powerful example of the USSR and the suffering capitalist unemployment brought.
Proletarian revolutions do not break out every year or so, like new car models. They appear infrequently since working-people prefer to accomodate themselves to capitalism if at all possible. They tend to be last-ditch defensive reactions to the mounting violence and insecurity brought on by capitalist war and depression.
The proletarian revolution first emerges within the context of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848. Even though the revolutions in Germany, France and Italy on the surface appeared to be a continuation of the revolutions of the 1780's and 90's, they contain within them anticapitalist dynamics. The working-class at this point in its history has neither the numbers, nor the organization, nor the self- consciousness to take power in its own name. Its own cause tends to get blurred with the cause of of other classes in the struggle against feudal vestiges.
Marx was able to distinguish the contradictory class aspects of the 1848 revolutionary upsurge with tremendous alacrity, however. Some of his most important contributions to historical materialism emerge out of this period and again in 1871 when the proletariat rises up in its own name during the Paris Commune. The 18th Brumaire was written in the aftermath of the failure of the revolution in France in 1848 to consolidate its gains. Louis Bonaparte emerges as a counterrevolutionary dictator who seems to suppress all classes, including the bourgeoisie. Marx is able to show that Bonapartism, like Fascism, is not a dictatorship that stands above all classes. The Bonapartist regime, whose social base may be middle-class, acts in the interest of the big bourgeoisie.
Robert Tucker's notes in his preface to the 18th Brumaire that, "Since Louis Bonaparte's rise and rule have been seen as a forerunner of the phenomenon that was to become known in the twentieth century as fascim, Marx's interpretation of it is of interest, among other ways, as a sort of a prologue to later Marxist thought on the nature and meaning of fascism."
The 18th Brumaire was written by Marx in late 1851 and early 1852, and appeared first in a NY magazine called "Die Revolution". This was a time of great difficulty for Marx. He was in financial difficulty and poor health. The triumph of the counterrevolution in France deepened his misery. In a letter to his friend Weydemeyer, Marx confides, "For years nothing has pulled me down as much as this cursed hemorrhoidal trouble, not even the worst French failure."
In section one of the 18th Brumaire, Marx draws a clear distinction between the bourgeois and proletarian revolution.
"Bourgeois revolutions like those of the eighteenth century storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day- but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [crapulence] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions like those of the nineteenth century constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals -- until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! "
Proletarian revolutions, Marx correctly points out, emerge from a position of weakness and uncertainty. The bourgeoisie emerges over hundreds of years within the framework of feudalism. At the time it is ready to seize power, it has already conquered major institutions in civil society. The bourgeoisie is not an exploited class and therefore is able to rule society long before its political revolution is effected. When it delivers the coup de grace to the monarchy, it does so from a position of overwhelming strength.
The workers are in a completely different position, however. They lack an independent economic base and suffer economic and cultural exploitation. Prior to its revolution, the working-class remains backward and therefore, unlike the bourgeoisie, is unable to prepare itself in advance for ruling all of society. It often comes to power in coalition with other classes, such as the peasantry.
Since it is in a position of weakness, it is often beaten back by the bourgeoise. But the bourgeoisie itself is small in numbers. It also has its own class interests which set it apart from the rest of society. Therefore, it must strike back against the workers by utilizing the social power of intermediate classes such as the peasantry or the middle-classes in general. It will also draw from strata beneath the working-class, from the so-called "lumpen proletariat". Louis Bonaparte drew from these social layers in order to strike back against the workers, so did Hitler.
Bonaparte appears as a dictator whose rule constrains all of society. In section seven of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx characterized Bonapartist rule in the following manner:
"The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy- Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its politicians and literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never tired of crying out to the revolution what St. Arsenius cried out to the Christians: 'Fuge, tace, quiesce!' ['Flee, be silent, keep still!'] Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: 'Fuge, tace, quiesce!'"
At first blush, Bonaparte seems to be oppressing worker and capitalist alike. Supported by the bourgeoisie at first, he drowns the Parisian working-class in its own blood in the early stages of the counterrevolution. He then turns his attention to the bourgeoisie itself and "jails", "gags" and imposes a "state of siege" upon it. By all appearances, the dictatorship of Bonaparte is a personal dictatorship and all social classes suffer. The Hitler and Mussolini regimes gave the same appearance. This led many to conclude that fascism is simply a totalitarian system in which every citizen is subordinated to the industrial-military-state machinery. There is the fascism of Hitler and there is the fascism of Stalin. A class analysis of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia would produce different political conclusions, however. Hitler's rule rested on capitalist property relations and Stalin's on collectivized property relations.
Bonaparte's rule, while seeming to stand above all social classes, really served to protect capitalist property relations. Bonaparte represents the executive branch of government and liquidates the parliamentary branch. The parliament contains parties from every social class, so a superficial view of Bonapartist rule would conclude that all classes have been curtailed. In actuality, the bourgeoisie maintains power behind the scenes.
In order to maintain rule, Bonapartism must give concessions to the lower-classes. It can not manifest itself openly as an instrument of the ruling-classes. It is constantly on the attack against both exploiter and exploited. It acts against exploited because it is ultimately interested in the preservation of the status quo. It acts against the exploiters, because it must maintain the appearance of "neutrality" above all classes.
Marx describes this contradictory situtation as follows:
"Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon's successor, by springing constant surprises -- that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d'etat in miniature every day -- Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Tunic of Trier, he duplicates in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column."
Bonaparte throws the bourgeois economy into a confusion, violates it, produces anarchy in the name of order. This is exactly the way fascism in power operates. Fascism in power is a variant of Bonapartism. It eventually stabilizes into a more normal dictatorship of capital, but in its early stages has the same careening, out-of-control behavior.
Bonapartism does not rest on the power of an individual dictator. It is not Louis Napoleon's or Adolph Hitler's power of oratory that explains their mastery over a whole society. They have a social base which they manipulate to remain in power. Even though a Bonapartist figure is ultimately loyal to the most powerful industrialists and financiers, he relies on a mass movement of the middle-class to gain power.
Louis Bonaparte drew from the peasantry. The peasantry was in conflict with the big bourgeoisie but was tricked into lending support to someone who appeared to act in its own behalf. The peasantry was unable to articulate its own social and political interests since the mode of production it relied on was an isolating one. Marx commented:
"The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself. "
Intermediate layers such as the peasantry are susceptible to Bonapartist and Fascist politicians. They resent both big capital and the working- class. They resent the banks who own their mortgage. They also resent the teamsters and railroad workers whose strikes disrupts their own private economic interests. They turn to politicians whose rhetoric seems to be both anti-capitalist and anti-working class. Such politicians are often masters of demagoguery such as Hitler and Mussolini who often employ the stock phrases of socialism.
The peasantry backed Bonaparte. It was also an important pillar of Hitler's regime. In the final analysis, the peasants suffered under both because the banks remained powerful and exploitative. The populism of Bonaparte and the "socialism" of Hitler were simply deceptive mechanisms by which the executive was able to rule on behalf of big capital.
Bonapartism, populism and fascism overlap to a striking degree. We see elements of fascism, populism and Bonapartism in the politics of Pat Buchanan. Buchanan rails against African-Americans and immigrants, both documented and undocumented. He also rails against Wall St. which is "selling out" the working man. Is he a fascist, however? Ross Perot employs a number of the same themes. Is he?
The problem in trying to answer these questions solely on the basis of someone's speeches or writings is that it ignores historical and class dynamics. Bonaparte and Hitler emerged as a response to powerful proletrian revolutionary attacks on capital. What are the objective conditions in American society today? Hitler based their power on large-scale social movements that could put tens of thousands of people into the streets at a moment's notice. These movements were not creatures of capitalist cabals. They had their own logic and their own warped integrity. Many were drawn to Hitler in the deluded hope that he would bring some kind of "all-German" socialism into existence. These followers were not Marxists, but they certainly hated the capitalist class. Are the people who attend Buchanan, Perot and Farrakhan rallies also in such a frenzied, revolutionary state of mind?
At what point are we in American society today?
I would argue that rather than being in a prerevolutionary situation, that rather we are in a period which has typified capitalism for the better part of a hundred and fifty years.We are in a period of capitalist "normalcy". Capitalism is a system which is prone to economic crisis and war. The unemployment and "downsizing" going on today are typical of capitalism in its normal functioning. We have to stop thinking as if the period of prosperity following WWII as normal. It is not. It is an anomaly in the history of capitalism. When industrial workers found themselves in a position to buy houses, send children through college, etc., this was only because of a number of exceptional circumstances which will almost certainly never arise again.
We are in a period more like the late 1800's or the early 1900's. It is a period of both expansion and retrenchment. It is a period of terrible reaction which can give birth to the Ku Klux Klan and the skinheads and other neo-Nazis. It is also a period which can give birth to something like Eugene V. Debs socialist party.
But if we don't recognize at which point we stand, we will never be able to build a socialist party. We will also not be in a position to resist fascism when it makes its appearance.
In my next report, I will take a look at the American Populist movement led by Tom Watson at the turn of the century. It is a highly contradictory social movement. In some respects it is fascist-like, in other respects it is highly progressive. If we understand American Populism, we will in a much better position to understand the populism of today.
These are the types of questions that we should be considering in the weeks to come:
1) Why did fascism emerge when it did? Could there have been fascism in the 1890's?
2) Is fascism limited to imperialist nations? Could there be fascism in third-world countries? Did Pinochet represent fascism in Chile?
3) What is the class base of the Nation of Islam? Can there be fascism emerging out of oppressed nationalities? Can a Turkish or Algerian fascism develop as a response to neo-fascism in Europe today?
4) The Italian government includes a "fascist" party that openly celebrates Mussolini. What should we make of this?
5) What is the difference between fascism and ultrarightism? Ultrarightism is a permanent feature of US and world politics. Was George Wallace a fascist? What would a European equivalent be?
6) Is fascism emerging in the former Soviet Union? Does Zherinovsky represent fascism? Is the cause of the civil war in former Yugoslavia Serbian or Croatian fascism?
7) Can there be a fascism which does not incorporate powerful anticapitalist themes and demagoguery? Joe McCarthy was regarded as a fascist-like figure, but had no use for radical left-wing verbiage or actions. What should we make of him?
8) If fascism emerged as a reaction to the powerful proletarian revolutionary movements of the 1920's and 30's, what types of conditions can we see in the foreseeable future that would provoke new fascist movements? If socialism is no longer objectively possible because of the ability of capitalism to "deliver the goods", what would the need for fascism be? Why would the capitalist class support a new Hitler when the working-class is so quiescient? Should we be thinking about a new definition of fascism?
9) Fascism has a deeply expansionist and bellicose dynamics. In the age of nuclear weaponry, can we expect imperialism to opt for a fascist solution? Would the Rockefellers et al allow a trigger-happy figure like "Mark from Michigan" in control of our nuclear weapons?
10) What tools are necessary to analyze fascism? Should we be looking at the speeches of Farrakhan or Mark from Michigan? Was this Marx's approach to Bonapartism?
2. TROTSKY ON BONAPARTISM AND FASCISM
Trotsky, like Lenin, was a revolutionary politician and not an economist or political scientist. Every article or book the two wrote was tied to solving specific political problems. When Lenin wrote "Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism", he was trying to define the theoretical basis for the Zimmerwald opposition to W.W.I. Similarly, when Trotsky wrote about German fascism, his purpose was to confront and defeat it.
Trotsky's understanding of how fascism came to power is very much grounded in the definition of "Bonapartism" contained in Marx's "18th Brumaire", a classic study of dictatorship in the 19th century. Marx was trying to explain how dictatorships of "men on horseback" such as Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew, can appear to stand suspended above all classes and to act as impartial arbitrator between opposing classes, even though they carry out the wishes of the capitalist ruling class. The capitalist class is small in number and periods of revolutionary crisis depend on these types of seemingly neutral strong men.
A true Bonapartist figure is somebody who emerges out of the military or state apparatus. In order to properly bamboozle the masses, he should have charismatic qualities. War heroes tend to move to the front of the pack when a Bonapartist solution is required. Charles DeGaulle is the quintessential Bonapartist figure of the modern age. If the US labor movement and the left had been much more powerful than it had been during the Korean war and had mounted a serious resistance to the war and to capitalist rule, it is not hard to imagine a figure such as General Douglas MacCarthur striving to impose a Bonapartist dictatorship. Since there was no such left-wing, it was possible for US capitalism to rule democratically. Democracy is a less expensive and more stable system.
Germany started out after W.W.I as a bourgeois democracy-- the Weimar Republic. The republic was besieged by a whole number of insurmountable problems: unemployment, hyperinflation, and resentment over territory lost to the allies.
The workers had attempted to make a socialist revolution immediately after W.W.I, but their leadership made a number of mistakes that resulted in defeat. The defeat was not so profound as to crush all future revolutionary possibilities. As the desperate 20's wore on, the working- class movement did regain its confidence and went on the offensive again. The two major parties of the working class, the CP and the SP, both grew.
In the late 1920's, Stalin had embarked on an ultraleft course in the USSR and CP's tended to reflect this ultraleftism in their own strategy and tactics. In Germany, this meant attacking the Socialist Party as "social fascist". The Socialist Party was not revolutionary, but it was not fascist. A united SP and CP could have defeated fascism and prevented WWII and the slaughter of millions. It was Stalin's inability to size up fascism correctly that lead to this horrible outcome.
Hitler's seizure of power was preceded by a series of rightward drifting governments, all of which paved the way for him. The SP found reasons to back each and every one of these governments in the name of the "lesser evil". (This is an argument we have heard from some leftists in the United States: "Clinton is not as bad as Bush"; "Johnson is not as bad as Goldwater, etc." The problem with this strategy is that allows the ruling class to limit the options available to the oppressed. The lesser evil is still evil.)
The last "lesser evil" candidate the German Social Democracy urged support for was Paul Von Hindenburg, a top general in W.W.I.. The results were disastrous. Hindenburg took office on April 10 of 1932 and basically paved the way for Adolph Hitler. Hindenburg allowed the Nazi street thugs to rule the streets, but enforced the letter of the law against the working-class parties. Elections may have been taking place according to the Weimar constitution, but real politics was being shaped in the streets through the demonstrations and riots of Nazi storm-troopers.
As these Nazi street actions grew more violent and massive, Hindenburg reacted on May 31 by making Franz Von Papen chancellor and instructed him to pick a cabinet "above the parties", a clear Bonapartist move. Such a cabinet wouldn't placate the Nazis. All they wanted to do was smash bourgeois democracy. As the civil war in the streets continued, Papen dissolved the Reichstag and called for new elections on July 31, 1932.
On July 17, the Nazis held a march through Altona, a working class neighborhood, under police protection. The provocation resulted in fighting that left 19 dead and 285 wounded. The SP and CP were not able to mount a significant counteroffensive and the right-wing forces gathered self-confidence and support from "centrist" voters. When elections were finally held on July 31, the Nazi party received the most votes and took power.
In his article "German Bonapartism", Trotsky tries to explain the underlying connections between the Bonapartist Hindenburg government and the gathering Nazi storm:
"Present-day German Bonapartism has a very complex and, so to speak, combined character. The government of Papen would have been impossible without fascism. But fascism is not in power. And the government of Papen is not fascism. On the other hand, the government of Papen, at any rate in the present form, would have been impossible without Hindenburg who, in spite of the final prostration of Germany in the war, stands for the great victories of Germany and symbolizes the army in the memory of the popular masses. The second election of Hindenburg had all the characteristics of a plebiscite. Many millions of workers, petty bourgeois, and peasants (Social Democracy and Center) voted for Hindenburg. They did not see in him any one political program. They did not see in him any one political program. They wanted first of all to avoid civil war, and raised Hindenburg on their shoulders as a superarbiter, as an arbitration judge of the nation. But precisely this is the most important function of Bonapartism: raising itself over the two struggling camps in order to preserve property and order."
The victory of Hitler represents a break with Bonapartism, since it represents the naked rule of finance capital and heavy industry. Fascism in Germany breaks the tension between classes by imposing a reign of terror on the working class. Once in power, however, fascism breaks its ties with the petty-bourgeois mass movement that ensured its victory and assumes a more traditional Bonapartist character. Hitler in office becomes much more like the Bonapartist figures who preceded him and seeks to act as a "superarbiter". In order to make this work, he launches an ambitious publics works program, invests in military spending and tries to coopt the proletariat. Those in the working-class who resist him are jailed or murdered.
In "Bonapartism and Fascism", written on July 15, 1934, a year after Hitler's rise to power, Trotsky clarifies the relationship between the two tendencies:
"What has been said sufficiently demonstrates how important it is to distinguish the Bonapartist form of power from the fascist form. Yet, it would be unpardonable to fall into the opposite extreme, that is, to convert Bonapartism and fascism into two logically incompatible categories. Just as Bonapartism begins by combining the parliamentary regime with fascism, so triumphant fascism finds itself forced not only to enter a bloc with the Bonapartists, but what is more, to draw closer internally to the Bonapartist system. The prolonged domination of finance capital by means of reactionary social demagogy and petty- bourgeois terror is impossible. Having arrived in power, the fascist chiefs are forced to muzzle the masses who follow them by means of the state apparatus. By the same token, they lose the support of broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie."
3. MICHAEL MANN ON FASCISM
Michael Mann believes that 20th century Marxism has made a mistake by describing fascism as a petty-bourgeois mass movement. He does not argue that the leaders were not bourgeois, or that the bourgeoisie behind the scenes was financing the fascists. He develops these points at some length in an article "Source of Variation in Working-Class Movements in Twentieth-Century Movement" which appeared in the New Left Review of July/August 1995.
If he is correct, then there is something basically wrong with the Marxist approach, isn't there? If the Nazis attracted the working-class, then wouldn't we have to reevaluate the revolutionary role of the working-class? Perhaps it would be necessary to find some other class to lead the struggle for socialism, if this struggle has any basis in reality to begin with.
Mann relies heavily on statistical data, especially that which can be found in M. Kater's "The Nazi Party" and D. Muhlberger "Hitler's Followers". The data, Mann reports, shows that "Combined, the party and paramilitaries had relatively as many workers as in the general population, almost as many worker militants as the socialists and many more than the communists".
Pretty scary stuff, if it's true. It is true, but, as it turns out, there are workers and there are workers. More specifically, Mann acknowledges that "Most fascist workers...came not from the main manufacturing industries but from agriculture, the service and public sectors and from handicrafts and small workshops." Let's consider the political implications of the class composition of this fascist strata." He adds that, "The proletarian macro-community was resisting fascism, but not the entire working-class." Translating this infelicitous expression into ordinary language, Mann is saying that as a whole the workers were opposed to fascism, but there were exceptions.
Let's consider who these fascist workers were. Agricultural workers in Germany: were they like the followers of Caesar Chavez, one has to wonder? Germany did not have large-scale agribusiness in the early 1920's. Most farms produced for the internal market and were either family farms or employed a relatively small number of workers. Generally, workers on smaller farms tend to have a more filial relationship to the patron than they do on massive enterprises. The politics of the patron will be followed more closely by his workers. This is the culture of small, private agriculture. It was no secret that many of the contra foot-soldiers in Nicaragua came from this milieu.
Turning to "service" workers, this means that many fascists were white-collar workers in banking and insurance. This layer has been going through profound changes throughout the twentieth century, so a closer examination is needed. In the chapter "Clerical Workers" in Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital", he notes that clerical work in its earlier stages was like a craft. The clerk was a highly skilled employee who kept current the records of the financial and operating condition of the enterprise, as well as its relations with the external world. The whole history of this job category in the twentieth century, however, has been one of de-skilling. All sorts of machines, including the modern-day, computer have taken over many of the decision-making responsibilities of the clerk. Furthermore, "Taylorism" has been introduced into the office, forcing clerks to function more like assembly-line workers than elite professionals.
We must assume, however, that the white-collar worker in Germany in the 1920's was still relatively high up in the class hierarchy since his or her work had not been mechanized or routinized to the extent it is today. Therefore, a clerk in an insurance company or bank would tend to identify more with management than with workers in a steel-mill. Even under today's changed economic conditions, this tends to be true. A bank teller in NY probably resents a striking transit worker, despite the fact that they have much in common in class terms. This must have been an even more pronounced tendency in the 1920's when white-collar workers occupied an even more elite position in society.
Mann includes workers in the "public sector". This should come as no surprise at all. Socialist revolutions were defeated throughout Europe in the early 1920's and right-wing governments came to power everywhere. These right-wing governments kept shifting to the right as the mass working-class movements of the early 1920's recovered and began to reassert themselves. Government workers, who are hired to work in offices run by right-wingers, will tend to be right-wing themselves. There was no civil-service and no unions in this sector in the 1920's. Today, this sector is one of the major supporters of progressive politics internationally. They, in fact, spearheaded the recent strikes in France. In the United States, where their composition tends to be heavily Black or Latino, also back progressive politics. But in Germany in the 1920's, it should come as no major surprise that some public sector workers joined Hitler or Mussolini's cause.
When Trotsky or E.J. Hobsbawm refer to the working-class resistance to Hitler or Mussolini, they have something specific in mind. They are referring to the traditional bastions of the industrial working-class: steel, auto, transportation, mining, etc. Mann concurs that these blue- collar workers backed the SP or CP.
There is a good reason why this was no accident. In Daniel Guerin's "Fascism and Big Business", he makes the point that the capitalists from heavy industry were the main backers of Hitler. The reason they backed Hitler was that they had huge investments in fixed capital (machines, plants, etc.) that were financed through huge debt. When capitalism collapsed after the stock-market crash, the owners of heavy industry were more pressed than those of light industry. The costs involved in making a steel or chemical plant profitable during a depression are much heavier. Steel has to be sold in dwindling markets to pay for the cost of leased machinery or machinery that is financed by bank loans When the price of steel has dropped on a world scale, it is all the more necessary to enforce strict labor discipline..
Strikes are met by violence. When the boss calls for speed-up because of increased competition, goons within a plant will attack workers who defend decent working conditions. This explains blue-collar support for socialism. It has a class basis.
These are the sorts of issues that Marxists should be exploring. Michael Mann is a "neo-Weberian" supposedly who also finds Marx useful. Max Weber tried to explain the growth of capitalism as a consequence of the "Protestant ethic". Now Mann tries to explain the growth of fascism as a consequence of working-class support for "national identity". That is to say, the workers backed Hitler because Hitler backed a strong Germany. This is anti-Marxist. Being determines consciousness, not the other way around. When you try to blend Marx with anti-Marxists like Weber or Lyotard or A.J. Ayer, it is very easy to get in trouble. I prefer my Marx straight, with no chaser.
4. NICOS POULANTZAS ON FASCISM
Nicos Poulantzas tried to carve out a political space for revolutionaries outside of the framework of the CP, especially the French Communist Party. Poulantzas wrote "Fascism and Dictatorship, The Third International and the Problem of Fascism" in 1968 when he was in the grips of a rather severe case of Maoism.
This put him in an obviously antagonistic position vis a vis Trotsky. Trotsky was the author of a number of books that tried to explain the victory of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco in terms of the failure of the Comintern to provide revolutionary leadership. Poulantzas's Maoism put him at odds with this analysis. His Maoist "revolutionary heritage" goes back through Dmitrov to Stalin and Lenin. In this line of pedigrees, Trotsky remains the mutt.
Poulantzas could not accept the idea that the Comintern was the gravedigger of revolutions, since the current he identified with put this very same Comintern on a pedestal. Yet the evidence of Comintern failure in the age of fascism is just too egregious for him to ignore. He explains this failure not in terms of bureaucratic misleadership, but rather in terms of "economism". This Althusserian critique targets the Comintern not only of the 1930s when Hitler was marching toward power, but to the Comintern of the early 1920s, before Stalin had consolidated his power. All the Bolsheviks to one extent or another suffered from this ideological deviation: Stalin and Trotsky had a bad case of it, so did Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev.
What form did this "economism" take? Poulantzas argues that the Third International suffered in its infancy from "economic catastrophism", a particularly virulent form of this ideological deviation. What happened, you see, is that the Communists relied too heavily on Lenin's "Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism". Lenin's pamphlet portrayed capitalism as being on its last legs, a moribund, exhausted economic system that was hanging on the ropes like a beaten prize-fighter. All the proletariat had to do was give the capitalist system one last sharp punch in the nose and it would fall to the canvas.
If capitalism was in its death-agony, then fascism was the expression of the weakness of the system in its terminal stages. Poulantzas observes:
"The blindness of both the PCI and KPD leaders in this respect is staggering. Fascism, according to them, would only be a 'passing episode' in the revolutionary process. Umberto Terracini wrote in Inprekorr, just after the march on Rome, that fascism was at most a passing 'ministerial crisis'. Amadeo Bordiga, introducing the resolution on fascism at the Fifth Congress, declared that all hat had happened in Italy was 'a change in the governmental team of the bourgeoisie'. The presidium of the Comintern executive committee noted, just after Hitler's accession to power: 'Hitler's Germany is heading for ever more inevitable economic catastrophe...The momentary calm after the victory of fascism is only a passing phenomenon. The wave of revolution will rise inescapably Germany despite the fascist terror..."
Now Poulantzas is correct to point out this aspect of the Comintern's inability to challenge and defeat fascism. Yes, it is "economic catastrophism" that clouded its vision. We must ask is this all there is to the problem? If Lenin's pamphlet had not swept the Communists off their feet, could they have gotten a better handle on the situation?
Unfortunately, the failure of the Comintern to provide an adequate explanation of fascism and a strategy to defeat it goes much deeper than this. The problem is that Stalin was rapidly in the process of rooting out Marxism from the Communist Party in the *very early* stages of the Comintern. Stalin's supporters were already intimidating and silencing Marxists in 1924, the year of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern.
>From around that time forward, the debate in the Comintern was not between a wide range of Marxist opinion. The debate only included the rightist followers of Bukharin and Stalin, the cagey spokesman for the emerging bureaucracy. The Soviet secret police and Stalin's goons were suppressing the Left Opposition. Shortly, Stalin would jail or kill its members. So when Poulantzas refers to the "Comintern", he is referring to a rump formation that bore faint resemblance to the Communist International of the heroic, early days of the Russian Revolution.
When Stalin took power, the Comintern became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy and Communist Parties tried to emulate the internal shifts of the Soviet party. The ultraleft, third period of the German Communist Party mirrored the extreme turn taken by Stalin against Bukharin and the right Communists in the late 1920s. Bukharin was for appeasement of the kulaks and, by the same token, class-collaborationist alliances with the national bourgeoisie of various countries. Stalin had embraced this policy when it was convenient.
When Stalin broke with Bukharin, he turned sharply to the ultraleft and dumped the rightist leadership of the Comintern. He replaced it with his lackeys who were all to happy to march in lock-step to the lunatic left. The German CP went to the head of the pack during this period by attacking the social democrats as being "social fascists".
Poulantzas maintains that the Kremlin did not have a master-puppet relationship to the Communist Parties internationally. Since the evidence to the contrary is rather mountainous, his explanations take on a labored academic cast that are in sharp contradistinction to his usually lucid prose. It also brings out the worst of his Maoist mumbo- jumbo:
"To sum up: the general line which was progressively dominant in the USSR and in the Comintern can allow us to make a relatively clear [!] periodization of the Comintern, a periodization which can also be very useful for the history of the USSR. But this is insufficient. For example, we have seen how the Comintern's Sixth (1928) and Seventh (1935) Congresses cannot be interpreted on the model of a pendulum (left opportunism/right opportunism), but that there is no simple continuity between them either. That corroborates the view that the turn in Soviet policy in relationship to the peasantry as a whole was not a simple, internal, 'ultra-left' turn. But it will be impossible to make a deeper analysis of this problem in relation to the Comintern until we have exactly established what was the real process involving the Soviet bourgeoisie [Don't forget, gang, this is 1968] during the period of the class struggle in the USSR -- which was considerably more than a simple struggle of the proletariat and poor peasants against the kulaks."
As Marxists, we should always avoid the temptation to resort to "deterministic" types of analysis. Poulantzas, the Althusserian, would never yield to such temptation. That is why refuses to make a connection between the ultraleft attack on the peasantry within the Soviet Union and the ultraleft turn internationally. I am afraid, however, that no other analysis makes any sense. Sometimes, a cigar is simply a cigar. Stalin, the quintessential bureaucrat seems only capable of lurching either to the extreme left or extreme right. His errors reflect an inability to project working-class, i.e., Marxist, solutions to political problems. By concentrating such enormous power in his hands, he guaranteed that every shift he took, the Communist Parties internationally would follow.
Ideology plays much too much of a role in the Poulantzas scheme of things. The Comintern messed up because it put Lenin on a pedestal. He also says that the bourgeoisie supported fascism because it too was in a deep ideological crisis. What does Poulantzas have to say about the German working-class? What does he say about the parties of the working-class? Could ideological confusion explain their weakness in face of the Nazi threat? You bet.
Poulantzas alleges that the rise of fascism in Germany corresponds to an ideological crisis of the revolutionary organizations, which in turn coincided with an ideological crisis within the working class. He says:
"Marxist-Leninist ideology was profoundly shaken within the working class: not only did it fail to conquer the broad masses, but it was also forced back where it managed to root itself. It is clear enough what happens when revolutionary organizations fail in their ideological role of giving leadership on a mass line: particular forms of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology invade the void left by the retreat of Marxist- Leninist ideology.
The influence of bourgeois ideology over the working class, in this situation of ideological crisis, took the classic form of trade unionism and reformism. It can be recognized not only in the survival, but also in the extending influence of social democracy over the working class, through both the party and trade unions, all through the rise of fascism. The advancing influence of social-democratic ideology was felt even in those sections of the working class supporting the communist party."
Comrades, this is not what Lenin said! Lenin said that socialist consciousness has to be brought into the working-class from the outside, from intellectuals who have mastered Marxism. Not is it only what Lenin said, it is happily what makes sense. Workers *never* rise above simple trade union consciousness.
When Poulantzas says that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology "invades" the working-class, he is mixing things up hopelessly. This type of ideology has no need to invade, it is *always* there. It is socialist ideas that are the anomaly, the exception.
Workers have no privileged status in class society. The ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. When Jon the railroad worker reports to this l*st about the numbers of his co-workers who are for Perot, he is conveying the same truth that is found in What is to be Done. The ideas that he supports are being "imported" into the rail yards. That's the way it goes.
This also explains the murderous fanaticism of the Shining Path. When they witness the "bourgeois" ideas of ordinary Peruvian workers, it is very tempting for them to put a bullet in the brain of any of them who stand in their way. If Maoism posits ideology as the enemy, no wonder they conceive of the class struggle as a struggle against impure thoughts. The answer to impure thoughts, of course, is patient explanation. This is the method of Marxism, the political philosophy of the working-class. Marxists try to resolve contradictions by reaching a higher level of understanding. Sometimes, it can be frustrating to put up with and work through these contradictions, but the alternative only leads down the blind alley to sectarianism and fanaticism.
5. DELEUZE/GUATTARI ON FASCISM
In the translator's foreword to "A Thousand Plateaus", Brian Massumi tells us that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze was prompted by the French worker-student revolt of 1968 to question the role of the intellectual in society. Felix Guattari, his writing partner, was a psychoanalyst who identified with R.D. Laing's antipsychiatry movement of the 1960's. Laing created group homes where schizophrenics were treated identically to the sane, sort of like the Marxism list. Guattari also embraced the protests of 1968 and discovered an intellectual kinship with Deleuze. Their first collaboration was the 1972 "Anti-Oedipus". Massumi interprets this work as a polemic against "State-happy or pro-party versions of Marxism". "A Thousand Plateaus", written in 1987, is basically part two of the earlier work. Deleuze and Guattari state that the two books make up a grand opus they call "Capitalism and Schizophrenia".
I read the chapter "1933" in "A Thousand Plateaus" with as much concentration as I can muster. Stylistically, it has a lot in common with philosophers inspired by Nietzsche. I am reminded of some of the reading I did in Wyndham Lewis and Oswald Spengler in a previous lifetime. These sorts of authors pride themselves in being able to weave together strands from many different disciplines and hate being categorized. Within a few pages you will see references to Kafka, American movies, Andre Gorz's theory of work and Clausewitz's military writings.
Their approach to fascism is totally at odds with the approach we have been developing in our cyberseminar. Thinkers such as Marx and Trotsky focus on the class dynamics of bourgeois society. Bonapartism is rooted in the attempt of the French bourgeoisie in 1848 to stave off proletarian revolution. Trotsky explains fascism as a totalitarian last- ditch measure to preserve private property when bourgeois democracy or the Bonapartist state are failing.
Deleuze and Guattari see fascism as a permanent feature of social life. Class is not so important to them. They are concerned with what they call "microfascism", the fascism that lurks in heart of each and every one of us. When they talk about societies that were swept by fascism, such as Germany, they totally ignore the objective social and economic framework: depression, hyperinflation, loss of territory, etc.
This is wrong. Fascism is a product of objective historical factors, not shortcomings in the human psyche or imperfections in the way society is structured. The way to prevent fascism is not to have unfascist attitudes or live in unfascist communities, like the hippies did in the 1960's. It is to confront the capitalist class during periods of mounting crisis and win a socialist victory.
In a key description of the problem, they say, "The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole."
This is a totally superficial understanding of how fascism came about. What is Left fascism? It is true that the Communist Party employed thuggish behavior on occasion during the ultraleft "Third Period". They broke up meetings of small Trotskyist groups while the Nazis were breaking up the meetings of trade unions or Communists. Does this behavior equal left Fascism? Fascism is a class term. It describes a mass movement of the petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class movement. This at least is the Marxist definition.
Fascism is not intolerance, bad attitudes, meanness or insensitivity. It is a violent, procapitalist mass movement of the middle-class that employs socialist phrase-mongering.
I want to conclude with a few words about Felix Guattari and Toni Negri's "Communists like Us". Unlike Deleuze/Guattari's collaborations, this is a perfectly straightforward political manifesto that puts forward a basic challenge to Marxism. It is deeply inspired by a reading of the 1968 struggle in France as a mass movement for personal liberation. Students and other peripheral sectors move into the foreground while workers become secondary. It is as dated as Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man".
The pamphlet was written in 1985 but has the redolence of tie-dyed paisley, patchouli oil and granny glasses. Get a whiff of this:
"Since the 1960's, new collective subjectivities have been affirmed in the dramas of social transformation. We have noted what they owe to modifications in the organization of work and to developments in socialization; we have tried to establish that the antagonisms which they contain are no longer recuperable within the traditional horizon of the political. But it remains to be demonstrated that the innovations of the '60s should above all be understood within the universe of consciousnesses, of desires, and of modes of behaviour."
I have some trouble understanding why Deleuze and Guattari are such big favorites with some of my younger friends. My friend Catherine who works in the Dean of Studies office at Barnard was wild about Derrida when I first met her four years ago. She started showing more of an interest in Marxism after Derrida did. But she is not reading the 18th Brumaire. She is reading Bataille, Deleuze/Guattari and Simone Weil. My guess is that a lot of people from her milieu feel a certain nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960's and in a funny sort of way, Deleuza/Guattari take that nostalgia and cater to it but in an ultrasophisticated manner. They wouldn't bother with Paul Goodman and Charles Reich, this crowd. But French and Italian theorists who write in a highly allusive and self-referential manner: Like wow, man!
6. TOM WATSON
Tom Watson was born in Thompson, Georgia on September 5, 1856. His father owned 45 slaves and 1,372 acres of land on which he grew cotton. These assets put the Watson family in the top third of the Georgian land-owning class, but not at the very top of the slaveocracy.
The slave-owning class hated the Northern industrial class which had won the civil war. The northerners brought an end to the old agrarian ways at the point of the bayonet during reconstruction. The Yankee industrial capitalist sought free land and free labor. This would allow him to commercially exploit the south and break up the older semi- feudal relations.
Young Tom Watson hated what was happening to the south and joined the Democratic Party soon after graduating college and starting a law profession. The Democrats in the south formed the political resistance to the northern based Republicans. The "white man's party" and the Democratic Party were terms used interchangeably.
Some of the southern capitalists aligned with the Democratic Party realized that the future belonged to the northern capitalist class and joined forces with them. They became avid partners in the commercial development of agriculture and the expansion of the railroads throughout the south. Most of these southerners were connected with a newly emerging finance capital, especially in the more forward- looking cities like Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta has always seen itself as representative of a "new south". It was to be the first to end Jim Crow and it was the first to develop an intensive financial and services-based infrastructure after WWII.
The intensive commercialization of the south impoverished many of the small and mid-sized farmers who found themselves caught between the hammer and anvil of railroad, retail store and bank. The banks charged exorbitant mortgages for land while the railroads exacted steep fees for transporting grain and cotton. It often cost a farmer a bushel of wheat just to bring a bushel of wheat to market. The retail stores charged high prices for manufactured goods and were often owned behind the scenes by bank or railroad.
Tom Watson identified with the exploited farmers who had begun to organize themselves into a group called the Farmer's Alliance, which started in Texas but soon spread throughout the south in the 1880's. The Alliance was determined to defend the interests of small farmers against the juggernaut of bank, railroad and retail entrepreneur. The Alliance evolved into the People's Party, the original version of the populists, a term that is much overused today.
In this emerging class conflict, what side would a Marxist support? After all, didn't Marx support the Yankees in the Civil War? Didn't the north represent industrialization, progress and modernization? Wasn't the Alliance simply a continuation of the old agricultural system?
When Tom Watson joined the Alliance cause, his words would not give a modernizer much encouragement. He said, "Let there come once more to Southern heart and Southern brain the Resolve--waste places built up. In the rude shock of civil war that dream perished. Like victims of some horrid nightmare, we have moved ever since-- powerless--oppressed--shackled--".
The Alliance, like the Democratic Party in the south, was for white people only. The leader of the Alliance in Texas, Charles Macune, was an outspoken racist.
A preliminary Marxist judgment on the Populists would be negative, wouldn't it, since their nostalgia for the old south is reactionary. Their roots in the Democratic Party, the "white man's party" would also make them suspect. Finally, why would Marxists support the antiquated agrarian life-style of small farmers against the northern capitalist class and their "new south" allies?
This snap judgment would fail to take into account the brutal transformations that were turning class relations upside down in the south. As farmers became pauperized by the commercial interests, many became share-croppers who had everything in common with the impoverished Okies depicted by John Steinbeck in the "Grapes of Wrath". Others became wage laborers on plantations, while others entered the industrial proletariat itself in the towns and cities of the "new south". The class interests of these current and former petty- bourgeois layers were arrayed against the big bourgeoisie of the south and north.
This impoverished white farmers found itself joined in dire economic circumstances with black farmers who had recently been freed from slavery, but who remained share-croppers for the most part. Those with a pessimistic view of human nature might assume that white and black farmer remained divided and weak. After all, doesn't racial solidarity supersede class interest again and again in American history?
The Populists defied expectations, however. They united black and white farmers and fought valiantly against Wall St. and their southern partners throughout the 1890's and nearly succeeded in becoming a permanent third party.
At their founding convention, the delegates to the People's Party adopted a program which included the following demands:
"The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized...
We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people...
The land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is the heritage of the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes, and alien ownership of land should be prohibited.
All land now held by railroads and other corporations in excess of their actual needs, and all lands owned by aliens [i.e., absentee landlords] should be reclaimed by the government and held for actual settlers only."
This program galvanized millions of farmers into action. They joined the People's Party and elected local, state and federal politicians including Tom Watson himself who went to Congress and spoke forcefully for the interests of small farmers.
Watson also was one of the Populist leaders who saw most clearly the need for black-white unity. Watson framed his appeal this way:
"Now the People's Party says to these two men, 'You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.'"
Watson spoke out forcefully against lynching, nominated a black man to his state executive committee and often spoke from the same platform with black populists to mixed audiences.
The Populists were a real threat to the capitalist system. While they did not advocate socialist solutions, they objectively defended the interests of both poor farmer and working-class. In many states in the west and north, populist farmers began to form ties with the newly emerging Knights of Labor. Both populist farmer and northern worker saw Wall St. as the enemy.
How and why did the populists disappear?
Watson became the Vice Presidential running-mate of the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Bryan had the reputation of being some kind of populist radical, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was the first in a long line of Democratic Party "progressives" who fooled the mass movement into thinking that the party could accommodate their needs.
Bryan did support the adoption of the silver standard (this was favored by farmers who sought more plentiful currency in expectation that this would bring down prices), but was cool to the rest of the populist demands. He had no use especially for any anti-corporate measures.
The populists were fooled into supporting Bryan, but the Democrats knew who their class-enemy was. Throughout the south, armed thugs destroyed populist party headquarters and terrorized party members. The combination of Bryan's co-optation and violence at the street level took the momentum out of this movement.
In a few short years, other factors served to dampen farmer radicalism. There was a European crop failure and American farmers were able to sell their goods at a higher price. Also, the United States started to develop as an imperial power through its conquest of the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The material and psychological benefits of these new colonies tended to mute class-consciousness among worker and farmer alike.
The populists dissolved slowly as the twentieth century approached. Some activists became members of the Progressive Party, while others joined Deb's Socialist Party. The working-class began to emerge as more of a self-aware, insurgent force in its own right, especially in its drive to form unions.
What lessons can be drawn about the People's Party? At the very least, it should teach us that politics can often be unpredictable. Who would imagine that the son of a slave-owner would end up as a defender of black rights nearly a century before the civil rights movement?
As we move forward in our study of fascism, and especially as we come close to the period when Black Nationalism and the militias show up, let us take care to look at a movement's class dynamics rather than the words of one or another leader. Marxism is suited to analysis of social forces in formation and development. It is ideally suited to understanding the types of rapid changes that are beginning to appear on the American political landscape.
7. PAT BUCHANAN AND AMERICAN FASCISM
The United States in the 1930s became a battleground between industrial workers and the capitalist class over whether workers would be able to form industrial unions. There had been craft unions for decades, but only industrial unions could fight for all of the workers in a given plant or industry. This fight had powerful revolutionary implications since the captains of heavy industry required a poorly paid, docile work-force in order to maximize profits in the shattered capitalist economy. There were demonstrations, sit-down strikes and even gun-fights led by the Communist Party and other left groups to establish this basic democratic right.
Within this political context, fascist groups began to emerge. They drew their inspiration from Mussolini's fascists or Hitler's brown- shirts. In a time of severe social crisis, groups of petty-bourgeois and lumpen elements begin to coalesce around demagogic leaders. They employ "radical" sounding rhetoric but in practice seek out working- class organizations to intimidate and destroy. One such fascist group was the Silver Shirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In chapter eleven of "Teamster Politics", SWP leader Farrell Dobbs recounts "How the Silver Shirts Lost Their Shrine in Minneapolis". It is the story of how Local 544 of the Teamsters union, led by Trotskyists, defended itself successfully from a fascist expedition into the city. Elements of the Twin Cities ruling-class, alarmed over the growth of industrial unionism in the city, called in Silver Shirt organizer Roy Zachary. Zachary hosted two closed door meetings on July 29 and August 2 of 1938. Teamster "moles" discovered that Zachary intended to launch a vigilante attack against Local 544 headquarters. They also discovered that Zachary planned to work with one F.L. Taylor to set up an "Associated Council of Independent Unions", a union-busting operation. Taylor had ties to a vigilante outfit called the "Minnesota Minute Men".
Local 544 took serious measures to defend itself. It formed a union defense guard in August 1938 open to any active union member. Many of the people who joined had military experience, including Ray Rainbolt the elected commander of the guard. Rank-and-filers were former sharpshooters, machine gunners and tank operators in the US Army. The guard also included one former German officer with WWI experience. While the guard itself did not purchase arms except for target practice, nearly every member had hunting rifles at home that they could use in the circumstance of a Silver Shirt attack.
Events reached a climax when Pelley came to speak at a rally in the wealthy section of Minneapolis.
Ray Rainbolt organized a large contingent of defense guard members to pay a visit to Calhoun Hall where Pelley was to make his appearance. The powerful sight of disciplined but determined unionists persuaded the audience to go home and Pelley to cancel his speech.
This was the type of conflict taking place in 1938. A capitalist class bent on taming workers; fascist groups with a documented violent, anti-labor record; industrial workers in motion: these were the primary actors in that period. It was characteristic of the type of class conflict that characterized the entire 1930s. It is useful to keep this in mind when we speak about McCarthyism.
WWII abolished a number of major contradictions in global capital while introducing others. The United States emerged as the world's leading capitalist power and took control economically and politically of many of the former colonies of the exhausted European powers. Inter-imperialist rivalries and contradictions seemed to be a thing of the past. England was the U.S.'s junior partner. The defeated Axis powers, Germany and Japan, were under Washington's thumb. France retained some independence. (To this day France continues to act as if it were an equal partner of the US, detonating nuclear weapons in the Pacific or talking back to NATO over policies in Bosnia.)
Meanwhile the USSR survived the war bloodied but unbowed. In a series of negotiations with the US and its allies, Stalin won the right to create "buffer" states to his West. A whole number of socialist countries then came into being. China and Yugoslavia had deep-going proletarian revolutions that, joined with the buffer states, would soon account for more than 1/4 of the world's population.
World imperialism took an aggressive stance toward the socialist bloc before the smoke had cleared from the WWII battlegrounds. Churchill made his "cold war" speech and contradictions between the socialist states and world capitalism grew very sharp. Imperialism began using the same type of rhetoric and propaganda against the USSR that it had used against the Nazis. Newreels of the early fifties would depict a spreading red blot across the European continent. This time the symbol superimposed on the blot was a hammer-and-sickle instead of a swastika. The idea was the same: to line up the American people against the enemy overseas that was trying to gobble up the "free world".
A witch-hunt in the United States, sometimes called McCarthyism, emerged in the United States from nearly the very moment the cold war started. The witch-hunt would serve to eradicate domestic opposition to the anti-Communist crusade overseas. The witch-hunters wanted to root up and eradicate all sympathy to the USSR. President Harry Truman, a Democrat and New Dealer, started the anticommunist crusade. He introduced the first witch-hunt legislation, a bill that prevented federal employees from belonging to "subversive" organizations. When Republican Dwight Eisenhower took office, he simply kept the witch-hunt going. The McCarthy movement per se emerges out of a reactionary climate created by successive White House administrations, Democrat and Republican alike.
I will argue that a similar dynamic has existed in US politics over the past twenty years. Instead of having a "cold war" against the socialist countries, we have had a "cold war" on the working-class and its allies. James Carter, a Democrat, set into motion the attack on working people and minorities, while successive Republican and Democratic administrations have continued to stoke the fire. Reaganism is Carterism raised to a higher level. All Buchanan represents is the emergence of a particularly reactionary tendency within this overall tendency toward the right.
Attacks on the working-class and minorities have nothing to do with "bad faith" on the part of people like William Clinton. We are dealing with a global restructuring of capital that will be as deep-going in its impact on class relations internationally as the cold war was in its time. The cold war facilitated the removal of the Soviet Union as a rival. Analogously, the class war on working people in the advanced capitalist countries that began in the Carter years facilitates capital's next new expansion. Capitalism is a dynamic system. This dynamism includes not only war and "downsizing", it also includes fabulous growth in places like the East Coast of China. To not see this is to not understand capitalism.
"The United States, the most powerful capitalist country in history, is a component part of the world capitalist system and is subject to the same general laws. It suffers from the same incurable diseases and is destined to share the same fate. The overwhelming preponderance of American imperialism does not exempt it from the decay of world capitalism, but, on the contrary, acts to involve it even more deeply, inextricably and hopelessly. US capitalism can no more escape from the revolutionary consequences of world capitalist decay than the older European capitalist powers. The blind alley in which world capitalism has arrived, and the US with it, excludes a new organic era of capitalist stabilization. The dominant world position of American imperialism now accentuates and aggravates the death agony of capitalism as a whole."
This appears in an article in the April 5, 1954 Militant titled "First Principles in the Struggle Against Fascism". It is of course based on a totally inaccurate misunderstanding of the state of global capital. Capitalism was not in a "blind alley" in 1954. The truth is that from approximately 1946 on capitalism went through the most sustained expansion in its entire history. To have spoken about the "death agony" of capitalism in 1954 was utter nonsense. This "catastrophism" could only serve to misorient the left since it did not put McCarthyism in proper context.
One of the great contributions made by Nicos Poulantzas in his "Fascism and the Third International" was his diagnosis of the problem of "catastrophism". According to Poulantzas, the belief that capitalism has reached a "blind alley" first appeared in the Comintern of the early 1920's. He blames this on a dogmatic approach to Lenin's "Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism" that existed in a communist movement that was all too eager to deify the dead revolutionist.
Lenin's theory of imperialism owed much to Hilferding and Bukharin who believed that capitalism was moribund and incapable of generating new technical and industrial growth. Moreover, this capitalist system was in a perpetual crisis and wars were inevitable. The Comintern latched onto this interpretation and adapted it to the phenomenon of fascism. Fascism, in addition to war, was also a permanent feature of the decaying capitalist system. A system that had reached such an impasse was a system that was in a permanent catastrophic mode. The Comintern said that it was five minutes to midnight.
The SWP's version of catastrophism did not allow it to see McCarthy's true mission. This mission was not to destroy the unions and turn the United States into a totalitarian state. It was rather a mission to eliminate radical dissent against the stepped-up attack on the USSR, its allies and revolutionary movements in the third world. The witch- hunt targeted radicals in the unions, the schools, the State Department, the media and elsewhere. After the witch-hunt had eradicated all traces of radical opinion, the US military could fight its imperialist wars without interference from the left. This is exactly what took place during the Korean War. There were no visible signs of dissent except in the socialist press and in some liberal publications like I.F. Stone's Newsletter. This clamp-down on dissent lasted until the Vietnam war when a newly developing radicalization turned the witch-hunt back for good.
In the view of the SWP, nothing basically had changed since the 1930's. The target of McCarthyite "fascism" was the working-class and its unions. The Militant stated on January 18, 1954:
"If the workers' organizations don't have the answer, the fascists will utilize the rising discontent of the middle class, its disgust with the blundering labor leadership, and its frenzy at being ruined economically, to build a mass fascist movement with armed detachments and hurl them at the unions. While spouting a lot of radical-sounding demagogy they will deflect the anti-capitalist wrath of the middle class and deploy it against labor, and establish the iron- heel dictatorship of Big Capital on the smoking ruins of union halls."
One wonders if the party leadership in 1954 actually knew any middle- class people, since party life consisted of a "faux proletarian" subculture with tenuous ties to American society. Certainly they could have found out about the middle-class on the newly emerging TV situation comedies like "Father Knows Best" or "Leave it to Beaver". Rather than expressing "rising discontent" or "frenzy", the middle- class was taking advantage of dramatic increases in personal wealth. Rather than plotting attacks on union halls like the Silver Shirts did in 1938, they were moving to suburbia, buying televisions and station wagons, and taking vacations in Miami Beach or Europe. This was not only objectively possible for the average middle-class family, it was also becoming possible for the worker in basic industry. For the very same reason the working-class was not gravitating toward socialism, the middle-class was not gravitating toward fascism. This reason, of course, is that prosperity had become general.
The other day Ryan Daum posted news of the death of Pablo, a leader of the Trotskyist movement in the 1950s. European Trotskyism is generally much less dogmatic than its American and English cousins. While the party leadership in the United States hated Pablo with a passion, rank and filers often found themselves being persuaded by some ideas put forward by the Europeans.
One of these differences revolved around how to assess McCarthy. The party leadership viewed McCarthy as a fascist while a minority grouping led by Dennis Vern and Samuel Ryan based in Los Angeles challenged this view. Unfortunately I was not able to locate articles in which the minority defends its view. What I will try to do is reconstruct this view through remarks directed against them by Joseph Hansen, a party leader. This is a risky method, but the only one available to me.
Vern and Ryan criticize the Militant's narrow focus on the McCarthyite threat. They say, "The net effect of this campaign is not to hurt McCarthy, or the bourgeois state, but to excuse the bourgeois state for the indisputable evidences of its bourgeois character, and thus hinder the proletariat in its understanding that the bourgeois- democratic state is an 'executive committee' of the capitalist class, and that only a workers state can offer an appropriate objective for the class struggle."
I tend to discount statements like "only a workers state" since they function more as a mantra than anything else ("only socialism can end racism"; "only socialism can end sexism"-- you get the picture.) However, there is something interesting being said here. By singling out McCarthy, didn't the SWP "personalize" the problems the left was facing? A Democratic president initiated the witch-hunt, not a fascist minded politician. Both capitalist parties created the reactionary movement out of which McCarthy emerges. By the same token, doesn't the narrow focus on Buchanan today tend to lift some of the pressure on William Clinton. After all, if our problem is Buchanan, then perhaps it makes sense to throw all of our weight behind Clinton.
Vern and Ryan also offer the interesting observation that McCarthy has been less anti-union than many bourgeois politicians to his left. The liberal politicians railed against McCarthy's assault on civil liberties, but meanwhile endorsed all sorts of measures that would have weakened the power of the American trade union movement.
This was an interesting perception that has some implications I will attempt to elucidate. McCarthy did not target the labor movement as such because the post WWII social contract between labor and big business was essentially class-collaborationist. The union movement would keep its mouth shut about foreign interventions in exchange for higher wages, job security, etc. Social peace at home accompanied and eased the way of US capitalist expansionism overseas. The only obstacle to this social contract was the ideological left, those members of the union movement, the media, etc. They were all possible supporters of the Vietminh and other liberation movements. McCarthy wanted to purge the union movement of these elements, but not destroy the union movement itself. Turning our clock forward to 1996, does anybody think that Buchanan intends to break the power of the US working-class? Does big business need Buchanan when the Arkansas labor-hater is doing such a great job?
The SWP has had a tremendous attraction toward "catastrophism". Turning the clock forward from 1954 to 1988, we discover resident genius Jack Barnes telling a gathering of the faithful that capitalism finally is in the eleventh hour. In a speech on "What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold", he says:
"Neither past sources of rapid capital accumulation nor other options can enable the imperialist ruling classes to restore the long-term accelerating accumulation of world capitalism and avert an international depression and general social crisis....
"The period in the history of capitalist development that we are living through today is heading toward intensified class battles on a national and international scale, including wars and revolutionary situations. In order to squeeze out more wealth from the labor of exploited producers....
"Before the exploiters can unleash a victorious reign of reaction [i.e., fascism], however, the workers will have the first chance. The mightiest class battles of human history will provide the workers and exploited farmers in the United States and many other countries the opportunity to place revolutionary situations on the order of the day."
Someone should have thrown a glass of cold water in the face of this guru before he made this speech. He predicted depression, but the financial markets ignored him. The stock market recovered from the 1987 crash and has now shot up to over 5000 points. His statement that nothing could have averted an international depression shows that he much better qualified at plotting purges than plotting out the development of capital accumulation.
His statement that the "period in the history of capitalist development that we are living through" is heading toward wars and revolution takes the word "period" and strips it of all meaning. Nine years have passed and there is neither depression nor general social crisis. Is a decade sufficient to define a period? I think all of us can benefit from Jack Barnes' catastrophism if we simply redefine what a period is. Let us define it as a hundred years, then predictions of our Nostradamus might begin to make sense. Unfortunately, the art of politics consists of knowing what to do next and predictions of such a sweeping nature are worthless.
Sally Ryan posted an article from the Militant newspaper the other day. It states that Buchanan is a fascist:
"Buchanan is not primarily out to win votes, nor was he four years ago. He has set out to build a cadre of those committed to his program and willing to act in the streets to carry it out. He dubs his supporters the 'Buchanan Brigades'....
"Commenting on the tone of a recent speech Buchanan gave to the New Hampshire legislature, Republican state representative Julie Brown, said, 'It's just mean - like a little Mussolini.'....
"While he is not about to get the Republican nomination, Buchanan is serious in his campaign. The week before his Louisiana win, he came in first in a straw poll of Alaska Republicans and placed third in polls in New Hampshire, where the first primary election will be held. He is building a base regardless of how the vote totals continue to fall. And he poses the only real alternative that can be put forward within the capitalist system to the like-sounding Clinton and Dole - a fascist alternative."
These quotations tend to speak for a rather wide-spread analysis of Buchanan that a majority of the left supports, including my comrades on this list.
I want to offer a counter-analysis:
1) We are in a period of quiescence, not class confrontation.
Comrades, this is the good news and the bad news. It is good news because there is no threat of a fascist movement coming to power. It is bad news because it reflects how depoliticized the US working-class remains.
There is no fascist movement in the United States of any size or significance. It is time to stop talking about the militias of Montana. Let us speak instead of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. Has there been any growth of fascism? Of course not. In New York, my home town, there is no equivalent of the German- American bund, the fascists of the 1930s who had a base on New York's upper east side, my neighborhood.
There are no attacks on socialist or trade union meetings. There are not even attacks on movements of allies of the working-class. The women's movement, the black movement, the Central American movement organize peacefully and without interference for the simple reason that there are no violent gangs to subdue them.
The reason there are no violent gangs of fascists is the same as it was in the 1950s. We are not in a period of general social crisis. There are no frenzied elements of the petty-bourgeoisie or the lumpen proletariat being drawn into motion by demagogic and charismatic leaders like Mussolini or Hitler. There are no Silver Shirts that the labor or socialist movement needs protection from.
There is another key difference from the 1930s that we must consider. Capital and labor battled over the rights of labor within the prevailing factory system. Capitalism has transformed that factory system. Workers who remain in basic industry are not fighting for union representation. They simply want to keep their jobs. Those who remain employed will not tend to enter into confrontations with capital as long as wages and benefits retain a modicum of acceptability. That is the main reason industrial workers tend to be quiescent and will remain so for some time to come.
In the 1930s, workers occupied huge factories and battled the bosses over the right to a union. The bosses wanted to keep these factories open and strikes tended to take on a militant character in these showdowns. Strike actions tended to draw the working-class together and make it easier for socialists to get a hearing. This was because strikes were much more like mass actions and gave workers a sense of their power. The logical next step, according to the socialists, was trade union activity on a political level and, ultimately, rule by the workers themselves.
The brunt of the attack today has been downsizing and runaway capital. This means that working people have a fear of being unemployed more than anything else. This fear grips the nation. When a worker loses a job today, he or she tends to look for personal solutions: a move to another city, signing up for computer programming classes, etc. Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" vividly illustrated this type of personal approach Every unemployed auto worker in this film was trying to figure out a way to solve their problems on their own.
In the face of the atomization of the US working class, it is no surprise that many workers seem to vote for Buchanan. He offers them a variant on the personal solution. A worker may say to himself or herself, "Ah, this Buchanan's a racist bigot, but he's the only one who seems to care about what's happening to me. I'll take a gamble and give him my vote." Voting is not politics. It is the opposite of politics. It is the capitalist system's mechanism for preventing political action.
2) Buchanan is a bourgeois politician.
Pat Buchanan represents the thinking of an element of the US ruling class, and views the problems of the United States from within that perspective. Buchanan's nationalism relates very closely to the nationalism of Ross Perot, another ruling class politician.
A consensus exists among the ruling class that US capital must take a global route. The capitalist state must eliminate trade barriers and capital must flow to where there is greatest possibility for profit. Buchanan articulates the resentments of a section of the bourgeoisie that wants to resist this consensus. It would be an interesting project to discover where Buchanan gets his money. This would be a more useful of one's time than comparing his speeches to Father Coughlin or Benito Mussolini's.
There are no parties in the United States in the European sense. In Europe, where there is a parliamentary system, people speak for clearly defined programs and are responsible to clearly defined constituencies. In the United States, politics revolves around "winner take all" campaigns. This tends to put a spotlight on presidential elections and magnify the statements of candidates all out of proportion.
Today we have minute textual analysis of what Buchanan is saying. His words take on a heightened, almost ultra-real quality. Since he is in a horse race, the press tends to worry over each and every inflammatory statement he makes. This tends to give his campaign a more threatening quality than is supported by the current state of class relations in the United States.
3) The way to fight Buchanan is by developing a class alternative.
The left needs a candidate who is as effective as Buchanan in drawing class lines.
The left has not been able to present an alternative to Buchanan. It has been making the same kinds of mistakes that hampered the German left in the 1920s: ultraleft sectarianism and opportunism. Our "Marxist-Leninist" groups, all 119 of them, offer themselves individually as the answer to Pat Buchanan. Meanwhile, social democrats and left-liberals at the Nation magazine and elsewhere are preparing all the reasons one can think of to vote for the "lesser evil".
What the left needs to do is coalesce around a class-based, militant program. The left has not yet written this program, despite many assurances to the contrary we can hear on this list every day. It will have to be in the language of the American people, not in Marxist- Leninist jargon. Some people know how speak effectively to working people. I include Michael Moore the film-maker. I also include people like our own Doug Henwood, and Alex Cockburn and his co-editor Ken Silverstein who put out a newsletter called "Counterpunch".
Most of all, the model we need is like Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Party of the turn of the century, minus the right-wing. Study the speeches of Debs and you get an idea of the kind of language we need to speak. Our mission today remains the same as it was in turn of the century Russia: to build a socialist party where none exists.
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Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com
Miro23 , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 8:38 am GMT
MLK , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 4:53 pm GMTSo what happened following the dissolution of the Soviet Union?
The United States dispatched a cabal of cutthroat economists to Moscow to assist in the "shock therapy" campaign that collapsed the social safety net, savaged pensions, increased unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and alcoholism by many orders of magnitude, accelerated the slide to privatization that fueled a generation of voracious oligarchs, and sent the real economy plunging into an excruciating long-term depression.
Basically the NWO mafia saw that there was an opportunity to loot the place and they did it – gaining ownership – and stripping everything of value out of the place.
If the US public had the sense to realize it, it's the same as is currently happening to them.
panzerfaust , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 5:04 pm GMTAt the same time Washington's agents were busy looting Moscow, NATO was moving its troops, armored divisions and missile sites closer to Russia's border in clear violation of promises that were made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to move its military "one inch east".
Yeah, yeah . . . This reminds me of that line from Animal House: "Face it Kent, you fucked up. You trusted us."
This was small beer in term's of betrayals the Russians have endured. What I've always liked about them is that they aren't bellyachers, like the Iranians are at the moment.
Ignore Western Media on Putin. He remains The Indispensable Man for Russia so he isn't going anywhere for the moment. I'm sure he'd love to become the Russian version of Deng but that's going to take a lot of preparatory work for him to get there.
@Huxley Very true and this idea that man sets himself at the top of the creation is exactly the philosophy of "Human Rights", the Masonic model imposed through the UN to the whole world.NPleeze , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 6:08 pm GMT
This ideology was launched by Freemasonry during the "Enlightenment", in the 18th century. It produced the Masonic French Revolution, the Masonic US republic and later the concept of "democracy".
Published in 1899 by Don Felix Sarda Y Salvany: Liberalism is a sin. This is from a Catholic priest, but we all share the same enemy.
http://www.liberalismisasin.com/@9/11 Inside job What cult of personality? There isn't one. People mostly like the decisions he makes, not because he makes them, but because they agree with them.Anonymous [242] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 8:17 pm GMTAs to Chabad Lubavitch, Putin is a politician – he mingles with Christians, Jews and Muslims. As evil as Chabad Lubavitch is, Putin also mingles with the Saudi Barbarians. It's hardly proof they control him.
Go find something real, you are making a fool of yourself spreading baseless propaganda. Next you will tell us about the $583 trillion he has stashed away, so he can use it, secretly, after he retires from his life-long dictatorship.
@Tucker Well said. The US and Israel are by far the most blatantly thuggish players on the international political stage... Must be a coincidence .
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Jan 22, 2019 | angrybearblog.com
likbez , January 25, 2020 3:10 pm
While I agree that the removal of Trump might be slightly beneficial (Pence-Pompeo duo initially will run scared), this Kabuki theater with Schiff in a major role is outright silly.
Adam Schiff physically resembles a typical prosperity theology preacher -- a classic modern American snake oil salesman. And with his baseless accusations and the fear to touch real issues , he is even worse than that -- he looks outright silly even for the most brainwashed part of the USA electorate ;-)
As he supported the Iraq war, he has no right to occupy any elected office. He probably should be prosecuted as a war criminal.
Realistically Schiff should be viewed as yet another intelligence agency stooge, a neocon who is funded by military contractors such as Northrop Grumman, which sells missiles to Ukraine.
The claim that Trump is influenced by Russia is a lie. His actions indicate that he is an agent of influence for Israel, not so much for Russia. Several of his actions were more reckless and more hostile to Russia than the actions of the Obama administration. Anyway, his policies toward Russia are not that different from Hillary's policies. Actually, Pompeo, in many ways, continues Hillary's policies.
The claim that the withdrawal of military aid from Ukraine somehow influences the balance of power in the region was a State department concocted scam from the very beginning. How sniper rifles and anti-tank missiles change the balance of power on the border with the major nuclear power, who has probably second or third military in the world.? They do not.
They (especially sniper rifles) will definitely increase casualties of Ukrainian separatists (and will provoke Russian reaction to compensate for this change of balance and thus increase casualties of the Ukrainian army provoking the escalation spiral ), but that's about it. So more people will die in the conflict while Northrop Grumman rakes the profits.
They also increase the danger of the larger-scale conflict in the region, which is what the USA neocons badly wants to impose really crushing sanctions on Russia. The danger of WWIII and the cost of support of the crumbling neoliberal empire with its outsize military expenditures (which now is more difficult to compensate with loot) somehow escapes the US neocon calculations. But they are completely detached from reality in any case.
I think Russia can cut Ukraine into Western and Eastern parts anytime with relative ease and not much resistance. Putin has an opportunity to do this in 2014 (risking larger sanctions) as he could establish government in exile out of Yanukovich officials and based on this restore the legitimate government in Eastern and southern region with the capital in Kharkiv, leaving Ukrainian Taliban to rot in their own brand of far-right nationalism where the Ukraine identity is defined negatively via rabid Russophobia.
His calculation probably was that sanctions would slow down the Russia recovery from Western plunder during Yeltsin years and, as such, it is not worth showing Western Ukrainian nationalists what level of support in Southern and Eastern regions that they actually enjoy.
My impression is that they are passionately hated by over 50% of the population of this region. And viewed as an occupying force, which is trying to colonize the space (which is a completely true assessment). They are viewed as American stooges, who they are (the country is controlled from the USA embassy in any case).
And Putin's assessment might be wrong, as sanctions were imposed anyways, and now Ukraine does represent a threat to Russia and, as such, is a huge source of instability in the region, which was the key idea of "Nulandgate" as the main task was weakening Russia. In this sense, Euromaidan coup d'état was the major success of the Obama administration, which was a neocon controlled administration from top to bottom.
Also unclear what Dems are trying to achieve. If Pelosi gambit, cynically speaking, was about repeating Mueller witch hunt success in the 2018 election, that is typical wishful thinking. Mobilization of the base works both ways.
So what is the game plan for DemoRats (aka "neoliberal democrats" or "corporate democrats" -- the dominant Clinton faction of the Democratic Party) is completely unclear.
I doubt that they will gain anything from impeachment Kabuki theater, where both sides are afraid to discuss real issues like Douma false flag and other real Trump crimes.
Most Democratic candidates such as Warren, Biden, and Klobuchar will lose from this impeachment theater. Candidates who can gain, such as Major Pete and Bloomberg does not matter that much.
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Jan 24, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
"Praise be to God, who made our enemies fools."
The Killing
I've been writing and speaking for months about the looming danger of war with Iran, often to considerable skepticism.
In June, in an essay entitled " Eve of Destruction: Iran Strikes Back ," after the U.S. initiated its "maximum pressure" blockade of Iranian oil exports, I pointed out that "Iran considers that it is already at war," and that the downing of the U.S. drone was a sign that "Iran is calling the U.S. bluff on escalation dominance."
In an October essay , I pointed out that Trump's last-minute calling off of the U.S. attack on Iran in June, his demurral again after the Houthi attack on Saudi oil facilities, and his announced withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria were seen as "catastrophic" and "a big win for Iran" by the Iran hawks in Israel and America whose efforts New York Times (NYT) detailed in an important article, " The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran ." I said, with emphasis, " It always goes to Iran ," and underlined that Trump's restraint was particularly galling to hard-line zionist Republican Senators, and might have opened a path to impeachment. I cited the reported statement of a "veteran political consultant" that "The price of [Lindsey] Graham's support would be an eventual military strike on Iran."
And in the middle of December, I went way out on a limb, in an essay suggesting a possible relation between preparations for war in Iran and the impeachment process. I pointed out that the strategic balance of forces between Israel and Iran had reached the point where Israel thinks it's "necessary to take Iran down now ," in "the next six months," before the Iranian-supported Axis of Resistance accrues even more power. I speculated that the need to have a more reliable and internationally-respected U.S. President fronting a conflict with Iran might be the unseen reason -- behind the flimsy Articles of Impeachment -- that explains why Pelosi and Schumer "find it so urgent to replace Trump before the election and why they think they can succeed in doing that."
So, I was the guy chicken-littling about impending war with Iran.
But even I was flabbergasted by what Trump did. Absolutely gobsmacked. Killing Qassem Soleimani, Iranian general, leader of the Quds forces, and the most respected military leader in the Middle East? And Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, Iraqi commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) unit, Kataib Hezbollah? Did not see that coming. Rage. Fear. Sadness. Anxiety. A few days just to register that it really happened. To see the millions of people bearing witness to it. Yes, that happened.
Then there was the anxious anticipation about the Iranian response, which came surprisingly quickly, and with admirable military and political precision, avoiding a large-scale war in the region, for the moment.
That was the week that was.
But, as the man said: "It ain't over 'til it's over." And it ain't over. Recognizing the radical uncertainty of the world we now live in, and recognizing that its future will be determined by actors and actions far away from the American leftist commentariat, here's what I need to say about the war we are now in.
The first thing, the thing that is so sad and so infuriating and so centrally symptomatic of everything wrong with American political culture, is that, with painfully few exceptions, Americans have no idea of what their government has done. They have no idea who Qassem Soleimani was, what he has accomplished, the web of relationships, action, and respect he has built, what his assassination means and will bring. The last person who has any clue about this, of course, is Donald Trump, who called Soleimani " a total monster ." His act of killing Soleimani is the apotheosis of the abysmal, arrogant ignorance of U.S. political culture.
It's virtually impossible to explain to Americans because there is no one of comparable stature in the U.S. or in the West today. As Iran cleric Shahab Mohadi said , when talking about what a "proportional response" might be: "[W]ho should we consider to take out in the context of America? 'Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? 'All of their heroes are cartoon characters -- they're all fictional." Trump? Lebanese Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah said what many throughout the world familiar with both of them would agree with: "the shoe of Qassem Soleimani is worth the head of Trump and all American leaders."
To understand the respect Soleimani has earned, not only in Iran (where his popularity was around 80% ) but throughout the region and across political and sectarian lines, you have to know how he led and organized the forces that helped save Christians , Kurds , Yazidis and others from being slaughtered by ISIS, while Barack Obama and John Kerry were still " watching " ISIS advance and using it as a tool to "manage" their war against Assad.
In an informative interview with Aaron Maté, Former Marine Intelligence Officer and weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, explains how Soleimani is honored in Iraq for organizing the resistance that saved Baghdad from being overrun by ISIS -- and the same could be said of Syria, Damascus, or Ebril:
He's a legend in Iran, in Iraq, and in Syria. And anywhere where, frankly speaking, he's operated, the people he's worked with view him as one of the greatest leaders, thinkers, most humane men of all time. I know in America we demonize him as a terrorist but the fact is he wasn't, and neither is Mr. Mohandes.
When ISIS [was] driving down on the city of Baghdad, the U.S. armed and trained Iraqi Army had literally thrown down their weapons and ran away, and there was nothing standing between ISIS and Baghdad
[Soleimani] came in from Iran and led the creation of the PMF [Popular Mobilization Forces] as a viable fighting force and then motivated them to confront Isis in ferocious hand-to-hand combat in villages and towns outside of Baghdad, driving Isis back and stabilizing the situation that allowed the United States to come in and get involved in the Isis fight. But if it weren't for Qassem Soleimani and Mohandes and Kataib Hezbollah, Baghdad might have had the black flag of ISIS flying over it. So the Iraqi people haven't forgotten who stood up and defended Baghdad from the scourge of ISIS.
So, to understand Soleimani in Western terms, you'd have to evoke someone like World War II Eisenhower (or Marshall Zhukov, but that gets another blank stare from Americans.) Think I'm exaggerating? Take it from the family of the Shah :
Beyond his leadership of the fight against ISIS, you also have to understand Soleimani's strategic acumen in building the Axis of Resistance -- the network of armed local groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the PMF in Iraq, that Soleimani helped organize and provide with growing military capability. Soleimani meant standing up; he helped people throughout the region stand up to the shit the Americans, Israelis, and Saudis were constantly dumping on them
More apt than Eisenhower and De Gaulle, in world-historical terms, try something like Saladin meets Che. What a tragedy, and travesty, it is that legend-in-his-own-mind Donald Trump killed this man.
Dressed to Kill
But it is not just Trump, and not just the assassination of Soleimani, that we should focus on. These are actors and events within an ongoing conflict with Iran, which was ratcheted up when the U.S. renounced the nuclear deal (JCPOA – Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and instituted a "maximum pressure" campaign of economic and financial sanctions on Iran and third countries, designed to drive Iran's oil exports to zero.
The purpose of this blockade is to create enough social misery to force Iran into compliance, or provoke Iran into military action that would elicit a "justifiable" full-scale, regime-change -- actually state-destroying -- military attack on the country.
From its inception, Iran has correctly understood this blockade as an act of war, and has rightfully expressed its determination to fight back. Though it does not want a wider war, and has so far carefully calibrated its actions to avoid making it necessary, Iran will fight back however it deems necessary.
The powers-that-be in Iran and the U.S. know they are at war, and that the Soleimani assassination ratcheted that state of war up another significant notch; only Panglossian American pundits think the "w" state is yet to be avoided. Sorry, but the United States drone-bombed an Iranian state official accompanied by an Iraqi state official, in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi Prime Minister, on a conflict-resolution mission requested by Donald Trump himself. In anybody's book, that is an act of war -- and extraordinary treachery, even in wartime, the equivalent of shooting someone who came to parley under a white flag.
Indeed, we now know that the assassination of Soleimani was only one of two known assassination attempts against senior Iranian officers that day. There was also an unsuccessful strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, another key commander in Iran's Quds Force who has been active in Yemen. According to the Washington Post , this marked a "departure for the Pentagon's mission in Yemen, which has sought to avoid direct involvement" or make "any publicly acknowledged attacks on Houthi or Iranian leaders in Yemen."
Of course, because it's known as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," the Pentagon wants to avoid "publicly" bloodying its hands in the Saudi war in Yemen. Through two presidential administrations, it has been trying to minimize attention to its indispensable support of, and presence in, Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen with drone strikes , special forces operations , refueling of aircraft, and intelligence and targeting. It's such a nasty business that even the U.S. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to end U.S. military involvement in that war, which was vetoed by Trump.
According to the ethic and logic of American exceptionalism, Iran is forbidden from helping the Houthis, but the U.S. is allowed to assassinate their advisors and help the Saudis bomb the crap out of them.
So, the Trump administration is clearly engaged in an organized campaign to take out senior Iranian leaders, part of what it considers a war against Iran. In this war, the Trump administration no longer pretends to give a damn about any fig leaf of law or ethics. Nobody takes seriously the phony "imminence" excuse for killing Soleimani, which even Trump say s "doesn't matter," or the "bloody hands" justification, which could apply to any military commander. And let's not forget: Soleimani was " talking about bad stuff ."
The U.S. is demonstrating outright contempt for any framework of respectful international relations, let alone international law. National sovereignty? Democracy? Whatever their elected governments say, we'll will keep our army in Syria to "take the oil," and in Iraq to well, to do whatever the hell we want. "Rules-based international order"? Sure, we make the rules and you follow our orders.
The U.S.'s determination to stay in Iraq, in defiance of the explicit, unequivocal demand of the friendly democratic government that the U.S. itself supposedly invaded the country to install, is particularly significant. It draws the circle nicely. It demonstrates that the Iraq war isn't over. Because it, and the wars in Libya and Syria, and the war that's ratcheting up against Iran are all the same war that the U.S. has been waging in the Middle East since 2003. In the end is the beginning, and all that.
We're now in the endgame of the serial offensive that Wesley Clark described in 2007, starting with Iraq and "finishing off" with Iran. Since the U.S. has attacked, weakened, divided, or destroyed every other un-coopted polity in the region (Iraq, Syria, Libya) that could pose any serious resistance to the predations of U.S. imperialism and Israel colonialism, it has fallen to Iran to be the last and best source of material and military support which allows that resistance to persist.
And Iran has taken up the task, through the work of the Quds Force under leaders like Soleimani and Shahlai, the work of building a new Axis of Resistance with the capacity to resist the dictates of Israel and the U.S. throughout the region. It's work that is part of a war and will result in casualties among U.S. and U.S.-allied forces and damage to their "interests."
What the U.S. (and its wards, Israel and Saudi Arabia) fears most is precisely the kind of material, technical, and combat support and training that allows the Houthis to beat back the Saudis and Americans in Yemen, and retaliate with stunningly accurate blows on crucial oil facilities in Saudi Arabia itself. The same kind of help that Soleimani gave to the armed forces of Syria and the PMF in Iraq to prevent those countries from being overrun and torn apart by the U.S. army and its sponsored jihadis, and to Hezbollah in Lebanon to deter Israel from demolishing and dividing that country at will.
It's that one big "endless" war that's been waged by every president since 2003, which American politicians and pundits have been scratching their heads and squeezing their brains to figure out how to explain, justify (if it's their party's President in charge), denounce (if it's the other party's POTUS), or just bemoan as "senseless." But to the neocons who are driving it and their victims -- it makes perfect sense and is understood to have been largely a success. Only the befuddled U.S. media and the deliberately-deceived U.S. public think it's "senseless," and remain enmired in the cock-up theory of U.S. foreign policy, which is a blindfold we had better shed before being led to the next very big slaughter.
The one big war makes perfect sense when one understands that the United States has thoroughly internalized Israel's interests as its own. That this conflation has been successfully driven by a particular neocon faction, and that it is excessive, unnecessary and perhaps disruptive to other effective U.S. imperial possibilities, is demonstrated precisely by the constant plaint from non-neocon, including imperialist, quarters that it's all so "senseless."
The result is that the primary object of U.S. policy (its internalized zionist imperative) in this war is to enforce that Israel must be able, without any threat of serious retaliation, to carry out any military attack on any country in the region at any time, to seize any territory and resources (especially water) it needs, and, of course, to impose any level of colonial violence against Palestinians -- from home demolitions, to siege and sniper killings (Gaza), to de jure as well as de facto apartheid and eventual further mass expulsions, if deems necessary.
That has required, above all, removing -- by co-option, regime change, or chaotogenic sectarian warfare and state destruction -- any strong central governments that have provided political, diplomatic, financial, material, and military support for the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism. Iran is the last of those, has been growing in strength and influence, and is therefore the next mandatory target.
For all the talk of "Iranian proxies," I'd say, if anything, that the U.S., with its internalized zionist imperative, is effectively acting as Israel's proxy.
It's also important, I think, to clarify the role of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in this policy. KSA is absolutely a very important player in this project, which has been consistent with its interests. But its (and its oil's) influence on the U.S. is subsidiary to Israel's, and depends entirely on KSA's complicity with the Israeli agenda. The U.S. political establishment is not overwhelmingly committed to Saudi/Wahhabi policy imperatives -- as a matter, they think, of virtue -- as they are to Israeli/Zionist ones. It is inconceivable that a U.S. Vice-President would declare "I am a Wahhabi," or a U.S. President say "I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die" for Saudi Arabia -- with nobody even noticing . The U.S. will turn on a dime against KSA if Israel wants it; the reverse would never happen. We have to confront the primary driver of this policy if we are to defeat it, and too many otherwise superb analysts, like Craig Murray, are mistaken and diversionary, I think, in saying things like the assassination of Soleimani and the drive for war on Iran represent the U.S. " doubling down on its Saudi allegiance ." So, sure, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Batman and Robin.
Iran has quite clearly seen and understood what's unfolding, and has prepared itself for the finale that is coming its way.
The final offensive against Iran was supposed to follow the definitive destruction of the Syrian Baathist state, but that project was interrupted (though not yet abandoned) by the intervention of Syria's allies, Russia and Iran -- the latter precisely via the work of Soleimani and the Quds Force.
Current radical actions like the two assassination strikes against Iranian Quds Force commanders signal the Trump administration jumping right to the endgame, as that neocon hawks have been " agitating for ." The idea -- borrowed, perhaps from Israel's campaign of assassinating Iranian scientists -- is that killing off the key leaders who have supplied and trained the Iranian-allied networks of resistance throughout the region will hobble any strike from those networks if/when the direct attack on Iran comes.
Per Patrick Lawrence , the Soleimani assassination "was neither defensive nor retaliatory: It reflected the planning of the administration's Iran hawks, who were merely awaiting the right occasion to take their next, most daring step toward dragging the U.S. into war with Iran." It means that war is on and it will get worse fast.
It is crucial to understand that Iran is not going to passively submit to any such bullying. It will not be scared off by some "bloody nose" strike, followed by chest-thumping from Trump, Netanyahu, or Hillary about how they will " obliterate " Iran. Iran knows all that. It also knows, as I've said before , how little damage -- especially in terms of casualties -- Israel and the U.S. can take. It will strike back. In ways that will be calibrated as much as possible to avoid a larger war, but it will strike back.
Iran's strike on Ain al-Asad base in Iraq was a case in point. It was preceded by a warning through Iraq that did not specify the target but allowed U.S. personnel in the country to hunker down. It also demonstrated deadly precision and determination, hitting specific buildings where U.S. troops work, and, we now know, causing at least eleven acknowledged casualties.
Those casualties were minor, but you can bet they would have been the excuse for a large-scale attack, if the U.S. had been entirely unafraid of the response. In fact, Trump did launch that attack over the downing of a single unmanned drone -- and Pompeo and the neocon crew, including Republican Senators, were " stunned " that he called it off in literally the last ten minutes . It's to the eternal shame of what's called the "left" in this country that we may have Tucker Carlson to thank for Trump's bouts of restraint.
There Will Be Blood
But this is going to get worse, Pompeo is now threatening Iran's leaders that "any attacks by them, or their proxies of any identity, that harm Americans, our allies, or our interests will be answered with a decisive U.S. response." Since Iran has ties of some kind with most armed groups in the region and the U.S. decides what "proxy" and "interests" means, that means that any act of resistance to the U.S., Israel, or other "ally" by anybody -- including, for example, the Iraqi PMF forces who are likely to retaliate against the U.S. for killing their leader -- will be an excuse for attacking Iran. Any anything. Call it an omnibus threat.
The groundwork for a final aggressive push against Iran began back in June, 2017, when, under then-Director Pompeo, the CIA set up a stand-alone Iran Mission Center . That Center replaced a group of "Iran specialists who had no special focus on regime change in Iran," because "Trump's people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group." The purpose of this -- as of any -- Mission Center was to "elevate" the country as a target and "bring to bear the range of the agency's capabilities, including covert action" against Iran. This one is especially concerned with Iran's "increased capacity to deliver missile systems" to Hezbollah or the Houthis that could be used against Israel or Saudi Arabia, and Iran's increased strength among the Shia militia forces in Iraq. The Mission Center is headed by Michael D'Andrea, who is perceived as having an "aggressive stance toward Iran." D'Andrea, known as "the undertaker" and " Ayatollah Mike ," is himself a convert to Islam, and notorious for his "central role in the agency's torture and targeted killing programs."
This was followed in December, 2017, by the signing of a pact with Israel "to take on Iran," which took place, according to Israeli television, at a "secret" meeting at the White House. This pact was designed to coordinate "steps on the ground" against "Tehran and its proxies." The biggest threats: "Iran's ballistic missile program and its efforts to build accurate missile systems in Syria and Lebanon," and its activity in Syria and support for Hezbollah. The Israelis considered that these secret "dramatic understandings" would have "far greater impact" on Israel than Trump's more public and notorious recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli's capital.
The Iran Mission Center is a war room. The pact with Israel is a war pact.
The U.S. and Israeli governments are out to "take on" Iran. Their major concerns, repeated everywhere, are Iran's growing military power, which underlies its growing political influence -- specifically its precision ballistic missile and drone capabilities, which it is sharing with its allies throughout the region, and its organization of those armed resistance allies, which is labelled "Iranian aggression."
These developments must be stopped because they provide Iran and other actors the ability to inflict serious damage on Israel. They create the unacceptable situation where Israel cannot attack anything it wants without fear of retaliation. For some time, Israel has been reluctant to take on Hezbollah in Lebanon, having already been driven back by them once because the Israelis couldn't take the casualties in the field. Now Israel has to worry about an even more battle-hardened Hezbollah, other well-trained and supplied armed groups, and those damn precision missiles . One cannot overstress how important those are, and how adamant the U.S. and Israel are that Iran get rid of them. As another Revolutionary Guard commander says : "Iran has encircled Israel from all four sides if only one missile hits the occupied lands, Israeli airports will be filled with people trying to run away from the country."
This campaign is overseen in the U.S. by the likes of " praying for war with Iran " Christian Zionists Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, who together " urged " Trump to approve the killing of Soleimani. Pence, whom the Democrats are trying to make President, is associated with Christians United For Israel (CUFI), which paid for his and his wife's pilgrimage to Israel in 2014, and is run by lunatic televangelist John Hagee, whom even John McCain couldn't stomach. Pompeo, characterized as the "brainchild" of the assassination, thinks Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran. (Patrick Lawrence argues the not-implausible case that Pompeo and Defense Secretary Esper ordered the assassination and stuck Trump with it.) No Zionists are more fanatical than Christian Zionists. These guys are not going to stop.
And Iran is not going to surrender. Iran is no longer afraid of the escalation dominance game. Do not be fooled by peace-loving illusions -- propagated mainly now by mealy-mouthed European and Democratic politicians -- that Iran will return to what's described as "unconditional" negotiations, which really means negotiating under the absolutely unacceptable condition of economic blockade, until the U.S. gets what it wants. Not gonna happen. Iran's absolutely correct condition for any negotiation with the U.S. is that the U.S. return to the JCPOA and lift all sanctions.
Also not gonna happen, though any real peace-loving Democratic candidate would specifically and unequivocally commit to doing just that if elected. The phony peace-loving poodles of Britain, France, and Germany (the EU3) have already cast their lot with the aggressive American policy, triggering a dispute mechanism that will almost certainly result in a " snapback " of full UN sanctions on Iran within 65 days, and destroy the JCPOA once and for all. Because, they, too, know Iran's nuclear weapons program is a fake issue and have "always searched for ways to put more restrictions on Iran, especially on its ballistic missile program." Israel can have all the nuclear weapons it wants, but Iran must give up those conventional ballistic missiles. Cannot overstate their importance.
Iran is not going to submit to any of this. The only way Iran is going to part with its ballistic missiles is by using them. The EU3 maneuver will not only end the JCPOA, it may drive Iran out of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As Moon of Alabama says, the EU3 gambit is "not designed to reach an agreement but to lead to a deeper conflict" and ratchet the war up yet another notch. The Trump administration and its European allies are -- as FDR did to Japan -- imposing a complete economic blockade that Iran will have to find a way to break out of. It's deliberately provocative, and makes the outbreak of a regional/world war more likely. Which is its purpose.
This certainly marks the Trump administration as having crossed a war threshold the Obama administration avoided. Credit due to Obama for forging ahead with the JCPOA in the face of fierce resistance from Netanyahu and his Republican and Democratic acolytes, like Chuck Schumer. But that deal itself was built upon false premises and extraordinary conditions and procedures that -- as the current actions of the EU3 demonstrate -- made it a trap for Iran.
With his Iran policy, as with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, what Trump is doing -- and can easily demonstrate -- is taking to its logical and deadly conclusion the entire imperialist-zionist conception of the Middle East, which all major U.S. politicians and media have embraced and promulgated over decades, and cannot abandon.
With the Soleimani assassination, Trump both allayed some of the fears of Iran war hawks in Israel and the U.S. about his "reluctance to flex U.S. military muscle" and re-stoked all their fears about his impulsiveness, unreliability, ignorance, and crassness. As the the Christian Science Monitor reports, Israel leaders are both "quick to praise" his action and "having a crisis of confidence" over Trump's ability to "manage" a conflict with Iran -- an ambivalence echoed in every U.S. politician's "Soleimani was a terrorist, but " statement.
Trump does exactly what the narrative they all promote demands, but he makes it look and sound all thuggish and scary. They want someone whose rhetorical finesse will talk us into war on Iran as a humanitarian and liberating project. But we should be scared and repelled by it. The problem isn't the discrepancy in Trump between actions and attitudes, but the duplicity in the fundamental imperialist-zionist narrative. There is no "good" -- non-thuggish, non-repellent way -- way to do the catastrophic violence it demands. Too many people discover that only after it's done.
Trump, in other words, has just started a war that the U.S. political elite constantly brought us to the brink of, and some now seem desperate to avoid, under Trump's leadership . But not a one will abandon the zionist and American-exceptionalist premises that make it inevitable -- about, you know, dictating what weapons which countries can "never" have. Hoisted on their own petard. As are we all.
To be clear: Iran will try its best to avoid all-out war. The U.S. will not. This is the war that, as the NYT reports , "Hawks in Israel and America have spent more than a decade agitating for." It will start, upon some pretext, with a full-scale U.S. air attack on Iran, followed by Iranian and allied attacks on U.S. forces and allies in the region, including Israel, and then an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran -- which they think will end it. It is an incomprehensible disaster. And it's becoming almost impossible to avoid.
The best prospect for stopping it would be for Iran and Russia to enter into a mutual defense treaty right now. But that's not going to happen. Neither Russia nor China is going to fight for Iran. Why would they? They will sit back and watch the war destroy Iran, Israel, and the United States.
Happy New Year.
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Jan 24, 2020 | dissidentvoice.org
Behind the façade of the impeachment spectacle – Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz are now on Trump's legal team – is a ruling class consensus that trumps partisan differences. As political economist Rob Urie perceptively observed :
The American obsession with electoral politics is odd in that 'the people' have so little say in electoral outcomes and that the outcomes only dance around the edges of most people's lives. It isn't so much that the actions of elected leaders are inconsequential as that other factors -- economic, historical, structural and institutional, do more to determine 'politics.'
In the highly contested 2016 presidential contest, nearly half the eligible US voters opted out, not finding enough difference among the contenders to leave home. 2020 may be an opportunity; an opening for an alternative to neoliberal austerity at home and imperial wars abroad lurching to an increasingly oppressive national security state. The campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbord and before them Occupy point to a popular insurgency. Mass protests of the dispossessed are rocking France , India , Colombia , Chile , and perhaps here soon.
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Jan 10, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org
A Thursday article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone discusses Dennis Kucinich's work in politics, from Kucinich's eight terms in the United Sates House of Representatives to his two presidential campaigns to his activities since leaving political office. Taibbi, in the article focused much on Kucinich's long-term devotion to advancing the case for peace, describes Kucinich as "antiwar to his core."
Read Taibbi's article here .
Kucinich is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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- 2020
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- Persian Gulf Tanker Attack: Iran Guilty? False Flag? Cui Bono?
13th June 2019
- US Libertarian Party Chairman Promoting Video Calling for Venezuela Regime Change
10th June 2019
- Mike Gravel Says Legalize All Drugs
7th June 2019
- Amazon to Keep Aiding Government's Facial Recognition Surveillance
5th June 2019
- Texas Bans Red Light Cameras
4th June 2019
- May
- Don't Prosecute Julian Assange, Thank Him
30th May 2019
- McAdams: Bolton 'Giving Dumb Advice' on Iran & N. Korea
28th May 2019
- Andrew Napolitano: President Trump Is Continuing the Long Trend of Expanding Presidential Power
20th May 2019
- Andrew Napolitano Praises San Francisco's Facial Recognition Technology Ban
17th May 2019
- Who Attacked Four Oil Tankers in United Arab Emirates?
14th May 2019
- Lawrence Wilkerson: We Could See a Repeat of the Vietnam War in Venezuela
13th May 2019
- Lawrence Wilkerson Warns the US is Driving Down a Highway to War with China
11th May 2019
- This Week's Psilocybin Mushroom Vote and the Drug War's Future
9th May 2019
- New York City Eliminates Jail Phone Call Fees
8th May 2019
- Ron Paul Argues the Case Against Tariffs on Chinese Goods
6th May 2019
- Mexico's President Says End the Drug War
6th May 2019
- Legal Marijuana Home Delivery and Marijuana 'Hospitality Spaces' Coming to Colorado
4th May 2019
- Michael Scheuer: US Intervention in Venezuela is for the Benefit of Powerful Special Interests
3rd May 2019
- April
- Iran Appeals Directly To Trump: Your Advisers Dragging You Into War
29th April 2019
- Washington 'Thrives & Survives on War & Conflict' – Daniel McAdams
25th April 2019
- Why Bernie Sanders Can Defeat Donald Trump in 2020
19th April 2019
- 'Fort Trump': Poland Ready for US Military Base
18th April 2019
- Debate: Omar & AOC Join Rand Paul & Republicans to Urge Syria Withdrawal
5th April 2019
- McAdams: 'Trump White House is a "Cult" under Bolton'
4th April 2019
- Forty Martyrs Cathedral Reconsecrated in Aleppo
3rd April 2019
- Jacob Hornberger for President?
2nd April 2019
- Venezuela is 'most open US coup', pundit tells RT as WSJ talks 'getting Russia out of Caracas'
1st April 2019
- March
- McAdams: Guaido Losing Popularity at Home, Despite US Support
28th March 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Nicaragua, Mass Killing, Electoral College, New Mexico Marijuana, Drug War Conference
25th March 2019
- Hoax of All Hoaxes: RPI's Daniel McAdams on the Death of Russiagate
25th March 2019
- UPDATE: Twitter Lets Julian Assange's Mom Tweet Again
21st March 2019
- Neocons Want Brazil in NATO to Undermine Venezuela – Daniel McAdams
21st March 2019
- Twitter Prevents Julian Assange's Mom from Posting, Restricts Viewing of Her Past Posts
20th March 2019
- Ron Paul Airs Concerns about the Trump Presidency
19th March 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Watching Assange, Ocasio-Cortez, Expungement, Bernie Sanders, Alaska Marijuana
16th March 2019
- Lawrence Wilkerson: 'National Security' Spending Should Be Cut, Not Increased
14th March 2019
- The Real Big Time Bribes Going on at Colleges and Universities
13th March 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Jailing Manning, 'Antisemitism,' Whole Foods Marijuana, The Foreigner, RPI Conference
10th March 2019
- 'Bay of Pigs 2.0' US Invasion Plan for Venezuela Thwarted - Daniel McAdams
7th March 2019
- Recollections of Walter Jones and His Principled Votes in the US House of Representatives
7th March 2019
- Walter Block: US Government Should Ignore, Not Overthrow, 'Evil Dictators'
7th March 2019
- US Government's Top Pharmaceutical Official Promoting Eliminating Vaccination Exemptions
5th March 2019
- US Has Foreign Policy of 'World Domination' – Daniel McAdams
4th March 2019
- Making Marijuana Legalization More Freedom-Friendly
1st March 2019
- Senators to Reintroduce Bill to End US Involvement in Yemen War Next Week
1st March 2019
- February
- Lawrence Wilkerson: US Intervention in Venezuela is About Profits for the Rich, not Democracy and Freedom
27th February 2019
- Hard for US to 'Sell Regime Change' in Venezuela – Daniel McAdams
26th February 2019
- Congratulations Women, Judge Rules the US Military Should Draft You Too
25th February 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Syria Troops, Licensed Rights, Bossy US, Wisconsin Marijuana, Political Parties
25th February 2019
- Conservatives, China, and the USA
22nd February 2019
- Praise for Prof. Walter Block from a Three-Time Student
19th February 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Yemen Vote, Legalizing Marijuana, Women Working, Democracy Promotion, Checkpoint Alert
18th February 2019
- Lew Rockwell Calls 'Baloney' on Claim Iran is a National Security Threat to the United States
13th February 2019
- McAdams: Senate Finds 'No Collusion' Between Trump and Russia - Now What?
13th February 2019
- Venezuela: Politics of Regime Change 'Dangerous & Inhumane' - Daniel McAdams
12th February 2019
- Where Greens and Libertarians Can Agree
11th February 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Staying in Syria, Tulsi Gabbard, Acres of Hemp, Marianne Williamson, Mushroom Decrim
9th February 2019
- 'US Has a Military Junta' - Lew Rockwell
6th February 2019
- US plan for Latin America: 'Venezuela is just the beginning' – Daniel McAdams
5th February 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Pence Video, YouTube Suppression, Stone Raid, DNA Databases, Diplomatic Relations
3rd February 2019
- January
- Venezuela President Urges Americans to Seek Peace with His Country
31st January 2019
- Six Weeks in Jail for Possessing Laundry Detergent
31st January 2019
- Ron Paul Challenges 'Ironic' Advancing Democracy Reason for Imposing New President on Venezuela
28th January 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Venezuela Nonsense, US 'Diplomats,' Propaganda Trigger, Bloomberg, Shutdown Benefit
26th January 2019
- David Stockman: 'NATO is Obsolete; We Should Get Rid of It'
22nd January 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Barr on Marijuana, Venezuela, Syria, More Marijuana Legalization, Trump Speech
20th January 2019
- American Anchor for Iran's PressTV Still Jailed Without Charge
19th January 2019
- Amazon Shareholders Seek to Restrict Facial Recognition Technology Sales to Government Agencies
18th January 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: National Emergency, Foreign Bases, Marijuana Noncrackdown, Oligarchs, Roving Patrols
13th January 2019
- Ron Paul: The Warmongering in DC is Bipartisan
11th January 2019
- Ron Paul to President Trump and Congress: Don't Fence -- or Wall -- Us In
8th January 2019
- Fed Up WikiLeaks Emails Media List of 140 'False and Defamatory' Claims Not To Report as True
7th January 2019
- Taxing and Regulating the Hell out of Marijuana in California
6th January 2019
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Paul Advice, Graham Reassured, American Influence, NH Marijuana, White Marchers
5th January 2019
- Hey Mitt Romney: Autocracy, Corruption, and Brutality Are Hallmarks of US World Leadership
2nd January 2019
- President Trump's Lawyer Rudy Giuliani Says Do Not Prosecute Julian Assange
1st January 2019
- 2018
- December
- Leaving Syria: Will Trump Hold Fast?
31st December 2018
- Ron Paul: Trump Presidency is a 'Mixed Bag'
28th December 2018
- Flashback: Whistleblowers Panel at Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017
27th December 2018
- Trump Selects Former Boeing Executive to Replace Former General Dynamics Board Member as Defense Secretary
23rd December 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: New York Marijuana, Trump's Wall, Vaping Teens, Deportation Numbers, Heinlein Idea
22nd December 2018
- Ron Paul: 'Very Good' that President Trump is Pulling Troops out of Syria
20th December 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Yemen Rule, MI Home Grow, DNA Database, Legal Hemp, Free Speech
16th December 2018
- Ron Paul Takes On the US Foreign Policy of Interventionism
15th December 2018
- Lawrence Wilkerson: 'Arrogance of Power' Behind Arrest of Meng Wanzhou in Canada for US Extradition
11th December 2018
- Welcome to Trump Budget Management : A Week After Decrying a $716 Billion Defense Budget, Trump Agrees to $750 Billion Defense Budget
10th December 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana Reversal, New Liberal Order, Legal Hemp, Boycotting Israel, Marijuana Tax
8th December 2018
- Andrew Napolitano Discusses the 'Dark Side of Law Enforcement'
4th December 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Julian Assange, NJ Marijuana. Saudi Support, War and Debt, RI Marijuana
3rd December 2018
- November
- The Free State Project Jumps the Shark
29th November 2018
- Notes on the Khashoggi Case
24th November 2018
- Lew Rockwell Challenges President Trump's 'Sickening' Support for Saudi Arabia
22nd November 2018
- President Trump's Support of Saudi Arabia is Par for the Course in US Foreign Policy
21st November 2018
- California Democrat Threatens 'Nukes' If Americans Don't Hand Over Their Guns
16th November 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Bolton Speech, Warmonger Medal, Roadside Surveillance, Marijuana Tax, School Security
16th November 2018
- Three Ways the New Democratic House Majority May Investigate President Trump
11th November 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana Votes, Voting Libertarian, US Election, Marijuana Laws, Important Election
10th November 2018
- Trump Administration Considers Declaring Yemen's Houthis 'Terrorists'
9th November 2018
- October
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Blackface, Julian Assange, Mexico Marijuana, GDP, Big Tech Companies
29th October 2018
- This, in Part, is How Trump is Boosting GDP
26th October 2018
- Lawrence Wilkerson: US Antagonism toward Iran Is Supported by Iran Terrorism Lie
23rd October 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Canada Marijuana, Ambassador Nobody, Marijuana Ally, Federal Reserve, US Marijuana
21st October 2018
- Nevada Brothel Owner and Ron Paul Presidential Campaign Supporter Dennis Hof Has Died
16th October 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Nikki Haley, Canada Marijuana, Government Statistics, Expungement, Mexico Drug War
14th October 2018
- Hey, Loyola Students, Don't Boycott Prof. Walter Block
9th October 2018
- Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell's Wide-ranging Q&A at the Mises Institute
8th October 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Drug War Treaty, Yemen, License Plate Readers, Marijuana Crackdown, Iran Summit
7th October 2018
- September
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Iran Sanctions Workaround, Julian Assange, Venezuela, MeK, Wisconsin Hemp
30th September 2018
- Good News: Court Dismisses Case Against Civil Disobedience Hero John Miska
28th September 2018
- Lawrence Wilkerson: 'Irreconcilable Elements' Stand in Way of Korean Deal
27th September 2018
- Given Government's Apparent Goal to Eliminate Our Privacy, Will Mandatory Brain Implants Be Next?
25th September 2018
- Advice for Young Libertarians: Check Out the Ron Paul Institute
24th September 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: US Dollar, Reform, Poland Bases, Internal Poll, RPI Panel
23rd September 2018
- BREAKING: US Preparing Actions Against Venezuela
21st September 2018
- First US Territory Legalizes Marijuana
21st September 2018
- Ron Paul: 'The Evidence Is Very Clear' that the US Has Aligned Itself with al-Qaeda in Syria
18th September 2018
- Breaking: Massive Sustained Attack On Syria: Russian S-400 Defenses Possibly Active In Huge Escalation
17th September 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: World War III, Venezuela Coup, British Gold, Canada Border, Twitter Ban
17th September 2018
- Lew Rockwell Reminisces about Working for Ron Paul at the House of Representatives
13th September 2018
- Charles G. Koch's Reading List
10th September 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Twitter, Afghanistan War, Cameroon Military, Prisoners' Calls, November Event
9th September 2018
- Building a Broad Coalition - Ron Paul Congressional Staff Panel at RPI Media & War Conference
6th September 2018
- Trump's Mental Stability Questioned by America's Most Psychopathic City
6th September 2018
- Mexico May Legalize Heroin; Get Ready to Send In the US Air Force and Marines
3rd September 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: School Non-shootings, Murray Sabrin, Utah Marijuana, NJ Marijuana, Conference Video
2nd September 2018
- August
- Report: Chapel Hill Police Chief Ordered Officers To Stay Back As Protesters Tore Down Confederate Statue
31st August 2018
- Hemp Harvested Again at George Washington's Mount Vernon Farm
30th August 2018
- Patrick Buchanan Says Make Security Clearance Revocations Routine
23rd August 2018
- A Large, Expensive US Air Force Base in Africa
23rd August 2018
- More US Sanctions on Russia: RPI's Daniel McAdams on Why Trump's Being Played
22nd August 2018
- More US Marines Coming to Norway, a Strange Way to Seek Friendship with Russia
21st August 2018
- Brennan: 'We have never before seen the approval or removal of security clearances used as a political tool'
20th August 2018
- John Miska's Heroic Resistance in Charlottesville, Virginia
15th August 2018
- Ron Paul: We Need Alternatives to Social Media Companies that Are Silencing Dissent
9th August 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Twitter Purge, Alex Jones, More to Come, Government Pressure, Falling Giants
9th August 2018
- Peter Van Buren: Twitter Suspends Me Forever
7th August 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Criticizing Media, Bipartisanship, NY Marijuana, Weapons Salesman, Conflicting Votes
5th August 2018
- TSA Passenger Screening Could Be Eliminated at 150-plus Airports
1st August 2018
- Facebook Deletes 32 Pages; Blames Russians
1st August 2018
- July
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Defending Assange, Gerald Celente, NJ Marijuana, Russia Non-threat, Libertarian Misinfo
29th July 2018
- Will Russia 'Meddle' to Help Democrats in November?
25th July 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Cash, United California, Marijuana Regs, Trump Judges, Intelligence Community
23rd July 2018
- Trump Tweets War Warning, Pompeo Wants Regime Change: US Iran Attack Coming Soon?
23rd July 2018
- Who is Bill Browder and Why is Putin so Interested in Him?
21st July 2018
- New Poll: What If Russophobes Held A Rally And No One Came?
19th July 2018
- Andrew Napolitano's Freedom Watch Show to Return to Fox Television
18th July 2018
- Ron Paul Pleased with how President Trump Handled Himself at Trump-Putin Meeting
17th July 2018
- Stephen Cohen Challenges 'Mob Violence' Reaction to Trump-Putin Meeting
17th July 2018
- Ron Paul: Education, Not Politicians, Key for Liberty in the Long Term
16th July 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Nassim Taleb, Military Spending, Bag Ban, North America Marijuana, Price of Oil
14th July 2018
- Mueller Indicts 12 Russians - Should the Trump-Putin Summit be Cancelled?
14th July 2018
- US Airstrike Kills at Least 28 Civilians in Eastern Syria
14th July 2018
- Andrew Napolitano Is 'Gravely Disappointed' by President Trump's Supreme Court Pick
12th July 2018
- Saudi Arabia Issues Sweeping Pardon for Its Military Members Engaged in War on Yemen
12th July 2018
- Legalized Groping: Court Grants TSA The Right To Assault You
12th July 2018
- Trump Hammers NATO. Good! Let's Get Out!
11th July 2018
- Brett Kavanaugh: Triumph Of The 'Radical Center'
10th July 2018
- From North Korea To NATO - Diplomacy...Or More Deception?
9th July 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: United States, Charges Dropped, Search Warrant, Schedule One, Jefferson's Day
8th July 2018
- Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's Plan to Put Metal Detector Checkpoints in Schools across Texas
4th July 2018
- Sen. Graham Visits Syria, Attacks Trump Plan to Pull Troops Out
3rd July 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Troop Withdrawal, Carter Foiled, Marijuana Votes, Booting Assange, RPI Conference
1st July 2018
- June
- Keeping Government Employees Out of Your Business
27th June 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Assange Isolation, Blowback, New York Marijuana, NYC Marijuana, Ecstasy
24th June 2018
- US State Department 'Concerned' Over Syrian Government Operations in...Syria!
21st June 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Yemen, Farm Bill Hemp, Trump/Kim Meeting, Medical Marijuana, Dividing California
17th June 2018
- Why Is Washington Backing Saudi Starvation Policy In Yemen?
15th June 2018
- Who Won At The Summit? Trump or Kim?
12th June 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Bilderberg, Marijuana Prosecutions, Sports Politics, Marijuana Morality, RPI Conference
10th June 2018
- Six Against Trump: Who Wins At G-7 Summit?
7th June 2018
- New Report: War Crimes In Raqqa. Who's Guilty?
6th June 2018
- Military Keynesianism and the War on Independent Media
6th June 2018
- Supremes Miss The Point On 'Bake The Cake' Ruling
5th June 2018
- Ron Paul Rewind: The Right Not To Bake the Cake
4th June 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: RFK Assassination, Trump Pardons, Michigan Marijuana, FBI Spending, Hemp Subsidies
3rd June 2018
- Ron Paul: Effort to Eliminate Cash is an 'Attack on Individual Freedom'
1st June 2018
- May
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Kim Meeting, Empire, Venezuela Threat, Campaign Spying, Utah Marijuana
27th May 2018
- Why Ron Paul Thinks He Would Likely Be Impeached if He Were President
24th May 2018
- Decades of Unconstitutional Wars
23rd May 2018
- Ambassador Faith Whittlesey, Rest in Peace
21st May 2018
- Trump's Newest Threat To North Korea Makes A Deal Impossible
19th May 2018
- Ron Paul Supports American Exceptionalism?!
17th May 2018
- Washington, DC: Where Torture is More Forgivable Than Harassment
17th May 2018
- Ron Paul Interview with Larry King: Foreign Policy, Mueller Investigation, and More
16th May 2018
- Voters in Several States Set to Roll Back Marijuana Prohibition This Year
15th May 2018
- War Codes in Trump's Iran Proclamation
8th May 2018
- Huge Increase in NSA's Phone Calls and Text Messages Collection after 'Major Reform' of Mass Surveillance Program
7th May 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Utah Marijuana, Beto O'Rourke, Maine Marijuana, Repatriating Gold, Charleston Event
6th May 2018
- Pentagon Seeks Arms for 65,000 US-Backed Troops in Syria
5th May 2018
- US Watchdog: Afghan Military Shrinking Sharply
3rd May 2018
- US Sanctions Hit International Chess Organization FIDE
2nd May 2018
- The Clever Moon Jae-in: Trump Should Win the Nobel Prize
1st May 2018
- April
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Trump Missiles, US Marijuana, Border Agent Assaults, Canada Drug Decrim, Kyle Kashuv
30th April 2018
- David Stockman Enters Hostile Territory to Support Nonintervention and Oppose Increased Military Spending
25th April 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Friends and Adversaries, Partisan War, Texas Marijuana, Syria Attack, US Marijuana
23rd April 2018
- Lawrence Wilkerson: Cowardly Congress, Apathetic Americans Allow US Military Intervention
17th April 2018
- US: Russia Hacked The Evidence Of Chemical Attack In Syria
17th April 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Hemp Bill, Militarized America, Marijuana Disinfo, Utah Marijuana, Pain Killers
14th April 2018
- Trump Ordering Syria Attack Would Be an Unconstitutional, But Not Uncommon, Presidential Action
13th April 2018
- US War Making: What's in It for You?
13th April 2018
- Bolton And Mattis Feud Over Syria Strike As Assad Evacuates Weapons
12th April 2018
- Against War in Syria
12th April 2018
- Ron Paul Makes the Case for Libertarian Optimism
11th April 2018
- Ron Paul: 'Total Nonsense' to Claim Syria President Bashar al-Assad is Gassing His Own People
10th April 2018
- An Appeal to James Mattis
9th April 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Libertarian Moment, Trump Target, Census, the Free Society, Google
9th April 2018
- Trump: 'Just Kidding. We're Staying In Syria.'
5th April 2018
- A Pro-Life Libertarian Looks At Foreign Policy - With Guest Gary Heavin
4th April 2018
- Trump Shifts On Syria, Russia - Neocons Go Nuts!
3rd April 2018
- Arms Sales Champion...USA!
2nd April 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Sen. Manning, Drug War, Bill Weld, Pain Killers, New Conference Speaker
2nd April 2018
- March
- F-35 Boondoggle: More Military Spending Is Not More Security
28th March 2018
- Lawrence Wilkerson: John Bolton Is One of the Most Dangerous Americans I Have Ever Met
27th March 2018
- Don't Let The State Brainwash Your Kids: Homeschool! With Guest Tom Woods.
27th March 2018
- Trump Expels Russians - Poison Attack Or False Flag?
26th March 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Deep State, Saudi Arabia, Russiagate, Facebook, Nonintervention Conference
25th March 2018
- The Skripal Case: It Looks Like Mrs May Has Some Explaining to Do!
24th March 2018
- SPECIAL REPORT: Bolton To The White House - Pre-Emptive War On The Way?
23rd March 2018
- Why Are We Still In Syria?
22nd March 2018
- Attend a Great Nonintervention Conference and See Beautiful, Historically Rich Charleston Too!
21st March 2018
- East Ghouta: Obama's Last Stand In Syria?
21st March 2018
- Defense Secretary Mattis Makes Mad Dog Arguments Against Congress Barring Yemen War Support
20th March 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Trump Nominations, School Walkouts, Drug War Executions, Police Drones, UN Drug War
18th March 2018
- McMaster: US Troops Will Stay Until Syria Is Stabilized
15th March 2018
- Lawrence Wilkerson Is Not So Optimistic about a Meeting of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un
14th March 2018
- Russia Will Respond If US Attacks Syrian Government Forces
14th March 2018
- What is Driving New Drive for AUMF?
12th March 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: MSNBC Warmongering, Bipartisan Peace, Pardon, Pulse Killings, Wrongful Convictions
11th March 2018
- State Department's War on Political Dissent
8th March 2018
- Ron Paul: It Looks Like the US will be in Iraq until the US is Bankrupt
8th March 2018
- Hypersonic War
7th March 2018
- The Federal Reserve Wins in the Texas Democratic Primary
7th March 2018
- 'Operational pause': Turkish offensive in Syria's Afrin forces US to halt anti-ISIS battle
6th March 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: 'Take the Guns First.' AUMFs, Ukraine Weapons, No Guns List, Coffee Joint
4th March 2018
- Afghanistan's President Offers Taliban Talks 'Without Preconditions'
1st March 2018
- February
- US Special Envoy on North Korea Retires After Trump Rejects Talks
28th February 2018
- Ron Paul Wins a Stosscar!
27th February 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: School Shootings, Korean War II, Sessions Nonsense, Syria Missions, Liberland
25th February 2018
- Ron Paul Rewind: No to Endorsing Mitt Romney, Yes to Endorsing Peace, Prosperity, Liberty, and the Constitution
21st February 2018
- Adam Dick on Alaska Radio: 'Russiagate' Indictments, School Shootings, and More
20th February 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana President, Attacking Assange, War Costs, School Shootings, Empire of Lies
18th February 2018
- In Trump's 2019 Budget, Lockheed Looms Almost as Large as State Dept
17th February 2018
- Strike Two: US Again Launches 'Defense' Attack on Russian and Syrian Forces in Syria
13th February 2018
- David Stockman Challenges Economy-Harming, Unnecessary US Military Spending
13th February 2018
- Russian Fighters Killed In Clash With US-Led Coalition Forces In Syria
12th February 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: War on Kratom, Biden's Advice, NRA and Marijuana, Testing for Fentanyl, US Spending
11th February 2018
- Andrew Napolitano Calls Out FISA Court Charade
7th February 2018
- Lawrence Wilkerson: Trump's Iran War Push is a Replay of Bush's Iraq War Push
5th February 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Sanctions Suffering, Marijuana Record, Facial Recognition, Venezuela, Declassified Memo
5th February 2018
- Breaking: US-Backed Free Syrian Army Group Shoots Down Russian Jet, Kills Pilot
3rd February 2018
- RPI's Daniel McAdams on Congressional memo alleging FBI abused spying powers
2nd February 2018
- January
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Mexico Marijuana, Sanctuary Cities, Marijuana Harm, Diplomacy Option, NSA Honesty
28th January 2018
- Andrew Napolitano Doubles Down on Advice that President Trump Refuse to Talk with Russiagate Investigators
26th January 2018
- Lew Rockwell Discusses the Alternative Media Challenge to Pro-Government Propaganda
25th January 2018
- Andrew Napolitano: Wrong to Keep Mass Surveillance Memo Secret
23rd January 2018
- VP Pence Confirms US Will No Longer Certify Iran Deal
22nd January 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Napolitano Hotline, Imprisonment Rate, Assad Must Go, Charging Clapper, Rising Stocks
21st January 2018
- One Year In, President Trump Continues US Expansive Intervention Overseas
18th January 2018
- Silent Cal on "America First"
18th January 2018
- Libya Update: What's Really Behind the Airport Firefight?
17th January 2018
- US Builds Forces inside Syria
15th January 2018
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Bundy Case, Surveillance Vote, Vermont Marijuana, Assange Citizenship, Nemtsov Street
14th January 2018
- Libya Update: Power Struggles Continue - Will the UN Get its Way?
11th January 2018
- Good Advice from Andrew Napolitano: President Trump, Don't Talk with the FBI
10th January 2018
- Is There a Pathological Obsession with Hillary Clinton Amongst Hillary Haters?
10th January 2018
- Dennis Kucinich to Announce Ohio Governor Run
9th January 2018
- Ron Paul: The War on Drugs is a War on Liberty, Choice, and Responsibility
7th January 2018
- The People in Charge of the US Military
4th January 2018
- Trump Buys into Terrorist Safe Haven Myth as Justification for Wars
4th January 2018
- 2017
- December
- US-Led Coalition Continues to Underreport Civilians Killed in Iraq, Syria Airstrikes
29th December 2017
- From Snowden To Russia-gate - The CIA And The Media
26th December 2017
- NSA Surveillance Reauthorization Stalls on Demands for New Debate
21st December 2017
- Thank a Libertarian Write-in Candidate for Roy Moore's Election Loss?
20th December 2017
- May a US Government Effort to Stomp Out State-Legal Marijuana Activities Be Around the Corner?
18th December 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Car Tracking, Chocolate Ban, Media Perverts, Teens' Marijuana Use, Tax Bill Rush
16th December 2017
- Bill of Rights Protections Are for Terrorists Too
15th December 2017
- Tucker Carlson: Peter Strzok messages makes FBI agent look like a 'drunk guy on Facebook'
15th December 2017
- Ron Paul Describes the Foreign Policy Mission of the Ron Paul Institute
14th December 2017
- Ron Paul is Optimistic Philosophic Changes Will Lead to Greater Respect for Liberty
11th December 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Yemen Blockade, Israelgate, Cop Sentenced, Military Spending, Execution Capital
10th December 2017
- 44,000 US Troops on 'Unknown' Deployments Worldwide
9th December 2017
- Vermont Government May Approve Marijuana Legalization as Soon as January
8th December 2017
- Ron Paul, Peace Envoy to North Korea?
6th December 2017
- Ron Paul Discusses the Libertarian Revolution
4th December 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Facial Recognition, WI Hemp, Lauer's Button, Pennies Payment, Drug War Games
4th December 2017
- Libya - Trump Jumps Back In
2nd December 2017
- McAdams: US empire 'too fragile' for a free press
1st December 2017
- November
- McAdams: US envoy Nikki Haley is 'Bull in a China Shop, Not a Diplomat' on N Korea
30th November 2017
- Project Veritas Videos Are Far From a Threat to the Washington Post
29th November 2017
- Turning The Corner In Afghanistan
29th November 2017
- Depraved Treatment of Drug War Captives on US Coast Guard Ships
28th November 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana Legalization, Bye-Bye Google, Yemen Omission, Alcohol Tax, Redistrict for War
26th November 2017
- Pentagon to Admit to 2,000 Troops in Syria, Number Likely Far Higher
25th November 2017
- Libya: A New False Dawn
24th November 2017
- The Worldwide Influence of American States' Marijuana Legalization
24th November 2017
- Ron Paul Rewind: Ron Paul's Interview with Charlie Rose
21st November 2017
- OMG! Trump Aide Met With NATO Partner Hungary During Campaign!
20th November 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Slavery Support, RT Threat, Trump Impeachment, Kratom, Frisking Students
19th November 2017
- Reps. Duncan, Massie, and Jones Challenge the US Government's War in Afghanistan
17th November 2017
- Anti-Orban US State Dept Repeatedly Interferes in Hungarian Affairs – Daniel McAdams
15th November 2017
- Andrew Napolitano: 'Russiagate' Investigation Shows Prosecutors' Terrible 'Standard Operating Procedure'
15th November 2017
- Dennis Kucinich Discusses the 'Permanent Government' behind US Foreign Intervention
13th November 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Yemen Bill, Marijuana Momentum, Clinton Crime, Women Draft, Money Bomb
10th November 2017
- Bombshell: WikiLeaks Publishes CIA Hacking Tool Designed To 'Impersonate' Russia's Kaspersky Lab
9th November 2017
- Ron Paul: The Revolution is Alive and Well
8th November 2017
- China: The Donald's Pivot
8th November 2017
- Saudi Arabia Prevents Yemeni Govt Returning to South Yemen
7th November 2017
- Intel Committee Demands Fusion GPS Bank Records; Suspects Journalists Paid To Spread 'Russian Collusion' Claims
6th November 2017
- How Ron Paul Hopes People Will One Day Honor His Legacy
6th November 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Anti-Trump Media, Catalonia, DNC Scam, Twitter Nonsense, Police Accountability
5th November 2017
- Turning Singing of the National Anthem at Sporting Events into a Police and Military Support Ritual
1st November 2017
- October
- RPI's Daniel McAdams: Twitter's Decision to Ban Ads From RT, Sputnik 'is About Politics'
31st October 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana Poll, Troops in Africa, Twitter Ad Ban, Assad Must Go, NFL Ratings
29th October 2017
- Cuba - US Diplomats Retreat In Horror ... Because ... 'Crickets'
27th October 2017
- Niger Ambush Serves as Excuse for AFRICOM to Seek More Funds
23rd October 2017
- RPI's Daniel McAdams: 'Report Listing RT's Guests is Designed to Intimidate'
22nd October 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Drug Dogs, McCain's Award, NZ Marijuana, Amazon Rejection, Crime Lab
22nd October 2017
- Washington Forbids Serbia from De-Mining Syria
21st October 2017
- Texas City Declares No Harvey Relief Unless Applicants Promise Not To Boycott Israel
20th October 2017
- Ron Paul Discusses Decades of Wars' Damage to the American Economy
19th October 2017
- Former FEC Chair Calls For Crackdown on "Disinformation" In Internet In Major Threat To Free Speech
19th October 2017
- RPI's Daniel McAdams: 'The American Public Has Been Weaponized by Propaganda Since 9/11'
16th October 2017
- Lawrence Wilkerson: US 'Marching Down the Road to War' Against Iran
16th October 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: ICE Seizures, Roy Moore, Marijuana Industry, JFK Assassination, Wisconsin Hemp
16th October 2017
- Libya Update: ISIS Moving in?
15th October 2017
- Iran - Trump Has No Strategy, Only Aims And No Way To Achieve Them
13th October 2017
- Ron Paul's New Book 'The Revolution at Ten Years': Get Your Personalized Copy!
12th October 2017
- Mike Pence's Expensive Stunt
10th October 2017
- Dennis Kucinich: We Must Challenge the 'Two-Party Duopoly' Committed to War
9th October 2017
- How George Clooney Was Asked to Spy on Gadaffi, Before Hillary Clinton Decided to Destroy Libya
9th October 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: TSA Biometrics, Atlanta Decrim. Secession, Sheriff Indicted, Nicaragua Democracy
6th October 2017
- Ron Paul: Common Sense and Diplomacy are 'Off the Table' Regarding North Korea
3rd October 2017
- A Libertarian Perspective on Separatist Movements
2nd October 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Anthem Protests, Section 702, Yemen War, Russian Meddling, Surveillance Towers
1st October 2017
- September
- 'Clear That DHS Was Wrong': California Says Russians Did Not Hack Voting Systems
28th September 2017
- Ron Paul Urges Americans to Resist Deep State and Media Push for War on North Korea
26th September 2017
- Media Matters' Goofball Argument that the Drudge Report is a Russian Propaganda Pipeline
25th September 2017
- Libya Report: Gaddafi for President?
25th September 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Secession, Surveilling Manafort, Catalonia Crackdown, Hemp Farms, Marijuana Use
23rd September 2017
- Russell Brand on Drug Legalization Benefits
21st September 2017
- Libya Update: A Clash of Egos
20th September 2017
- How The Military Defeated Trump's Insurgency
19th September 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Spain War, Venezuela Oil, Manning's Fellowship, Border Searches, Lee Statue
18th September 2017
- New US Law Blurs the Line Between Hate Speech and Hate Crime
16th September 2017
- GOP Rep. Rohrabacher Sought Trump Deal With Assange
15th September 2017
- Goodbye, Robert E. Lee
13th September 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: USS Liberty, Obama Deportations, Vermont Police, Dennis Rodman, CSA Monuments
8th September 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Secretary of Raytheon, Police Militarization, Google, NYC Cigarettes, Animals' Marijuana
3rd September 2017
- US Admits Killing Civilians in Iraq, Syria; Far Understates Toll
2nd September 2017
- August
- Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017 Is Sold Out!
31st August 2017
- Lew Rockwell: US Fascism behind Websites Purge
30th August 2017
- YouTube 'Economically Censors' Ron Paul, Labels Videos 'Not Suitable' For All Advertisers
28th August 2017
- Lawrence Wilkerson: Expect New Afghanistan War Policy to 'Deepen the Failure'
28th August 2017
- Trump and the War Party: RPI's Daniel McAdams on Mises Weekends
26th August 2017
- Blowback: Israel Threatens Syria Over Iran
25th August 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Bundy Ranch, Trump Recants, Deadly Tasers, Ukraine Weapons, Anthem Protest
25th August 2017
- Senate Declares War On Wikileaks - With Philip Giraldi
24th August 2017
- Ron Paul Says President Trump's Afghanistan War Plan Calls for Perpetual War and is a Recipe for Disaster
23rd August 2017
- Pentagon Attacks Extremists At Home...But Finances Them Overseas
23rd August 2017
- Trump of Afghanistan
22nd August 2017
- Trump's 'New' Afghan Strategy: Protect The Empire!
22nd August 2017
- The Afghanistan Speech President Trump Should Deliver Tonight
21st August 2017
- Trump's Afghanistan Strategy: What To Expect. With Jacob Hornberger
21st August 2017
- Lawrence Wilkerson Explains the Danger of Trump Handing War Decisions over to Pentagon
21st August 2017
- White House Continues to Talk Up 'Preventative War' Against North Korea
21st August 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Racism, Venezuela, Saving Animals, Yemen Cholera, Roy Moore
17th August 2017
- The Truth About Yemen - With Vanessa Beeley
17th August 2017
- Is Hate Speech Free Speech?
16th August 2017
- Libya Update: Russia Changes the Game
15th August 2017
- Trump Administration Demands Information On Over A Million Visitors To Anti-Trump Website
15th August 2017
- End Of Iran Nuke Deal? What Comes Next...
15th August 2017
- Lew Rockwell: US Should Butt Out and Let South Korea Deal with North Korea
15th August 2017
- War Drums Beating For Venezuela?
14th August 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Invading Venezuela, Shona Banda, American Fear, Benghazi Emails, RPI Conference
14th August 2017
- Breaking: Donald Trump Considers War on Venezuela
11th August 2017
- EXPOSED: The Regime Change Efforts Of Federally-Backed Corporate Libertarians
11th August 2017
- US 'Greatest Threat To World Peace'? With Lew Rockwell
10th August 2017
- Only Morons Believe What The US Government Says About North Korea
9th August 2017
- Fire And Fury...And Profits! Korea Crisis Great For The War Industry
9th August 2017
- Rep. Walter Jones' Tireless Effort to End the Afghanistan War
8th August 2017
- War Drums Beating: North Korea Tops The List
8th August 2017
- Libya Update: Western Governments Still Eyeing Libyan 'Prize'
8th August 2017
- The Antiwar Conservatives, With Rep. John Duncan, Jr.
7th August 2017
- US Airstrikes Kill at Least 43 Civilians in Syria's Raqqa
6th August 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Trump's Oath, Renouncing Citizenship, North Korea, Syria Goal, Trump Crime
6th August 2017
- Pence Cheers New Russia Sanctions Bill, in Split with Trump
5th August 2017
- Ron Paul Fears Propaganda and False Flag Attack May Lead to War with North Korea
3rd August 2017
- We're Losing Afghanistan. Can We Win?
3rd August 2017
- Trump Signs Sanctions Bill - Another Deep State Victory
2nd August 2017
- Trump's US National Security Strategy - New Wine In Old Bottles?
1st August 2017
- New Russia Sanctions Come as Hacking Narrative Falls Apart
1st August 2017
- July
- Real Bipartisanship: Republicans And Democrats Unite For New Cold War
31st July 2017
- Andrew Napolitano on Natural Law and Positivism
30th July 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Russia Sanctions, Veterans Marijuana, DOJ Policy, Colin Kaepernick, RPI Conference
29th July 2017
- A Nonintervention Lesson from Ron Paul
28th July 2017
- Libya Report: New Wrinkle in US Plan For Gaddafi-Free Libya
27th July 2017
- What's Wrong With Auditing The Fed? Rep. Bill Posey Grills Janet Yellen
27th July 2017
- Killing and Dying for Minerals
27th July 2017
- Migrant Crisis, Secession, And More...Ask Ron Paul!
26th July 2017
- If Trump Doesn't Veto Sanctions Bill, 'He's Given Up on His Presidency'
26th July 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Israel Boycott, Uruguay Marijuana, Revolving Door, NH Marijuana, RPI Conference
22nd July 2017
- Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte Throws Rocks at US Glass House
21st July 2017
- Saudi Arabia - Bin Salman's Coup Is A Model For His Own Ouster
20th July 2017
- The Dangerous Rush to Prosecute Donald Trump and His Associates
18th July 2017
- Saif al-Islam plans for his re-arrest in a grand conspiracy.
17th July 2017
- Netanyahu Opposes US-Russia South Syria Ceasefire Deal
16th July 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana Bureaucracy, WaPo Conflict, Drug Decrim, Ronald Wayne, Thoreau Birthday
16th July 2017
- House Approves $696 Billion Military Spending Bill
15th July 2017
- Ron Paul Explains the Libertarian Option on Larry King's Politicking
12th July 2017
- Bionic Mosquito Draws Blood From Cathy Young
11th July 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Trump-Putin Meeting, Roy Moore, Wisconsin Taprooms, Catalonia, Texas Prisons
9th July 2017
- What a Trump-Putin Meeting Would Look Like in a Sane World
7th July 2017
- US Tells North Korea It Is Prepared to Go to War
5th July 2017
- Ron Paul: 'Most Wars Are Fought on Inflated Money'
1st July 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: NATO Eternal, Book Snoops, Phone Searches, War Power, Gold States
1st July 2017
- June
- On Robert Parry Receiving the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism
29th June 2017
- Mattis Claims White House Threat to Syria 'Worked'
28th June 2017
- One Nation . . . Indivisible?
27th June 2017
- Ron Paul Explains How America Should Be a World Leader
26th June 2017
- Israel's Fire Support For Its Al-Qaeda Mercenaries Started Three Years Ago
24th June 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Philando Castile, Edward Snowden, CIA Thieves, Yemen Torture, Free California
24th June 2017
- The World Is Going Down With Trump
23rd June 2017
- Ron Paul Interviews Snowden On 'The Rise Of The Deep State'
21st June 2017
- The CDC's Vaping Spin
20th June 2017
- America's Real Loss of Prestige and Leadership Abroad
19th June 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Trump's Non-Obstruction, Cuba, Yemen Cholera, Veterans' Holiday, Afghanistan Surge
18th June 2017
- There Will be Blood: The Alexandria Shooting and Civil War in America
15th June 2017
- RPI's McAdams: Senate's Russia Sanctions a 'Pre-Emptive Strike Against Trump'
14th June 2017
- Rep. Walter Jones: Debate and End the Afghanistan War
14th June 2017
- Five Democrat Votes Allow Trump's Saudi Weapons Deal To Clear Senate
13th June 2017
- US Troops Kill Three Civilians After Afghan Roadside Bombing
12th June 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Comey's Memos, Back Channel, Arizona Gold, Frisking Students, Total Information
11th June 2017
- Qatar Will Pay John Ashcroft $2.5 Million To Defend Against Terrorism Accusations
10th June 2017
- Ron Paul: US Intervention in Syria Undermining Syria War Deescalation Effort and US National Security
9th June 2017
- Did Comey Violate Laws In Leaking The Trump Memo?
8th June 2017
- White House Blames Iranian Victims for ISIS Attack
7th June 2017
- Jeremy Corbyn Talks of War and Blowback on the Campaign Trail
7th June 2017
- Ron Paul Tops List of 'Most Influential Libertarians'
2nd June 2017
- May
- The One Thing the 'Intelligence' Community Leak About Kushner Does Tell Us About Team Trump
31st May 2017
- US Wants Control Over Anbar And Beyond - Iraq and Syria Will Prevent It
30th May 2017
- Through the Looking Glass: Jared Kushner, the Russians and the Leaks
27th May 2017
- US Is Killing More Civilians in Syria Air War Than Assad Is
27th May 2017
- Taking Peace And Prosperity to Washington, DC!
25th May 2017
- Manchester Bomber Was Product of West's Libya/Syria Intervention
24th May 2017
- US Arms Makers' Stocks at Record Highs on Saudi Deal
23rd May 2017
- Trump Advisers Want at Least 50,000 US Troops in Afghanistan
18th May 2017
- Why Washington Took al-Qaeda in Syria off the Terrorist List
15th May 2017
- NATO's Biggest Challenge -- Make 'Frightened' Europe Pay Up!
13th May 2017
- Saudis Plan $40 Billion US Investment To 'Cement Ties With Trump'
11th May 2017
- The War on the First Amendment Didn't Start Last Week
11th May 2017
- Trump Is Making Good Diplomatic Progress With Russia
10th May 2017
- Texas House to Consider Marijuana Decriminalization Bill
10th May 2017
- Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey
9th May 2017
- A New Constitutional Convention?
8th May 2017
- The 'De-Escalation Zones' are a Clever Trick. Thank God.
6th May 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Iraq Agreement, Mass Surveillance, Paul Snooping, Afghan Presence, Distrust Government
6th May 2017
- Russia, Iran, Turkey Ban US Planes Above Syrian 'Safe Zones'
5th May 2017
- Wilbur Ross: Syria Missile Strike Was 'After-Dinner Entertainment' at Mar-a-Lago
2nd May 2017
- April
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Lethal Tasers, Trump's Wall, Berkeley Speech, School Friskings, War Power
29th April 2017
- US Deploys Troops Along Syria-Turkey Border
28th April 2017
- Robert Wenzel and Tom Woods Defend Ron Paul Against Absurd Attack
27th April 2017
- New IHS Jane's Study: Overthrow Assad and ISIS Comes Out on Top
24th April 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: US v. Assange, Trump Fan, Macedonia Money, Lincoln's War, FBI Investigation
24th April 2017
- US Preparing Charges Against Julian Assange
20th April 2017
- Are Psychopaths Running the Show?
20th April 2017
- Examining the Drug War and Trump Administration: Adam Dick on Liberty Talk Radio
19th April 2017
- Ron Paul: Neocons in Trump Administration are Pushing US Conflict with Russia
18th April 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Trump Intervention, Will Grigg, Border Searches, World Policeman, Symposium
17th April 2017
- CNN Confirms Fox's Napolitano - British Intelligence Passed On Trump Surveillance To US Spy Agency
13th April 2017
- Is Krugman Right About Syria?
13th April 2017
- Will Trump Win?
13th April 2017
- Ron Paul Warns of Dangers in America from Accelerated Middle East Intervention
13th April 2017
- The Last Palm Sunday in Syria?
13th April 2017
- Trump: NATO Is 'No Longer Obsolete'
12th April 2017
- The Malleable Bi-Partisan Utility of Poison Gas
12th April 2017
- Why Do Civilians Killed by US Bombers Count Less?
12th April 2017
- Andrew Napolitano: Police Had 'No Right' to Drag Passenger off United Plane
11th April 2017
- Ron Paul: US Attack on Syria is to Prop Up the Military-Industrial Complex
11th April 2017
- White House Sends Confusing Message on Syria Barrel Bombs
10th April 2017
- Dennis Kucinich Asks, 'Why Are We Helping ISIS?'
10th April 2017
- War and Peace in the Age of Trump
10th April 2017
- Rand Paul Calls For Congress To Demand War Powers Authorization . . . John McCain Says Paul Is 'Wrong' and Alone In The Senate
9th April 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: TSA Marijuana, Susan Rice, Syria Oil, Fantasy Sports, Asset Seizures
7th April 2017
- Syria Crisis Update: US Attack Imminent? And What You Can Do.
6th April 2017
- Ron Paul Sees Susan Rice Revelations as a Big Deal
5th April 2017
- March
- Five Minutes Five Issues: TSA Abuse, Marijuana Sentences, Phone Searches, Canada Marijuana, Natural Rights
31st March 2017
- Ron Paul: Don't Increase the US Government's Flow of Military Weapons to Police
30th March 2017
- NATO Wants to Bring Us 'As Close as Humanly Possible' to War
30th March 2017
- Rep. Walter Jones Challenges Speaker Paul Ryan's Refusal to Allow Afghanistan War Debate
29th March 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Audit the Fed, Healthcare Bill, Veterans' Guns, Bomb Threats, Police Cameras
27th March 2017
- Cornerstone of Afghan Reconstruction Effort -- Roads -- is Near-Total Failure
25th March 2017
- Is a National Government Necessary for National Defense?
24th March 2017
- Reports: US Airstrikes Killed 230 Civilians in Mosul Overnight
23rd March 2017
- Tillerson: US Forces Will Stay in Iraq After Defeat of ISIS
23rd March 2017
- Revealed: Intelligence Community Collected and Shared Information about Trump Transition People
22nd March 2017
- Honor the Great Peace Warrior, Ron Paul
21st March 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Phone Searches, War Guidelines, Michael Brown, Guilty Pleas, Assassination Secrets
19th March 2017
- Syria: The Micro World War
18th March 2017
- Lawrence Wilkerson Warns US Generating Enemies Beyond its Capacity to Deal With
14th March 2017
- Raqqa and Manjib Not Central to Assad
11th March 2017
- Ron Paul Calls WikiLeaks Revelation of CIA Documents 'Fantastic'
11th March 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Telescreens, Surveillance Elitism, Arizona Gold, Trump Pat-Down, CIA Truth
10th March 2017
- 'Bomb the Sh*t Out Of Them!' - Trump Drones Yemen More in One Week Than Obama in a Year
9th March 2017
- Trump Invades Syria
8th March 2017
- Can Public Opinion Check Presidential Power?
8th March 2017
- US Airstrikes Continue in Yemen, Killing Former Gitmo Detainee
7th March 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Anti-Marijuana Sessions, War Propaganda, No Guns List, Military Spending, Prostitution
6th March 2017
- James Clapper Denies Obama Wiretapped Trump
5th March 2017
- NATO's scaremongering about 'Russia threat' to Baltic States 'is all about money'
2nd March 2017
- February
- Winning Wars?
28th February 2017
- Al-Qaeda Gets An Oscar
27th February 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Poland Troops, Marijuana Crackdown, Jail Time, Mohammed's Letter, Symposium Speakers
26th February 2017
- US Ambassador to UN Nikki Haley: We Must Sanction Assad Over Chemical Weapons!
24th February 2017
- Andrew Napolitano: Rescinding of School Bathrooms Mandate is a 'Win for the Constitution'
23rd February 2017
- The War Hawks Rolled Donald Trump
23rd February 2017
- Ron Paul: End Unlimited Presidential War Power
22nd February 2017
- Liberty and Wealth in Jeopardy: Donald Trump's Law and Order Presidency
22nd February 2017
- Say Goodbye to 'Getting Along With Russia' - Trump's NSC Pick McMaster is a Major Hawk
20th February 2017
- Governor Kucinich?
18th February 2017
- The Cancer of War: US Used Depleted Uranium in Syria
17th February 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Poking Russia, Flynn Fuss, Protest Violence, US Killers, Wall Costs
17th February 2017
- Soros-Founded Group Seeks Trump Overthrow
16th February 2017
- Andrew Napolitano: Donald Trump Has to 'Fear the Intelligence Community'
16th February 2017
- Praise for the Ron Paul Institute
15th February 2017
- Dennis Kucinich: Push for 'New Cold War' Behind Effort Against Michael Flynn
14th February 2017
- David Stockman: People's Drug Use is 'None of the Government's Business'
13th February 2017
- What Do You Think About Sending Thousands More Troops to Afghanistan?
11th February 2017
- Hope and Worry about the New President
11th February 2017
- Ron Paul Calls Potential Deputy Secretary of State Elliott Abrams 'the Neocon's Neocon'
10th February 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Russia Confrontation, Murder Rate, Revoking Passports, Airstrikes, RPI Event
9th February 2017
- 'Democrats Have Made Common Cause with Neocons by Baiting Russia'
8th February 2017
- Rep. Maxine Waters: Trump Must Be Impeached Because Putin Invaded Korea!
6th February 2017
- David Stockman Challenges Trump Administration's Militarism and Drug War
6th February 2017
- About That Intel 'Treasure Trove' From Trump's Yemen Raid...
3rd February 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Saudi Friend, Targeting Americans, War Escalation, Regulations EO, Exclude Congressmen
3rd February 2017
- Pentagon Finally Admits it Killed Women and Children in Yemen
1st February 2017
- War Drums: Trump's National Security Advisor Threatens Iran
1st February 2017
- The Washington Post's War on Peacemakers
1st February 2017
- January
- US Sends Military Supplies To Syrian Alliance In First Under Trump Admin
31st January 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Iraq Oil, Wall Bill, Madonna's Thoughtcrime. Ma's Advice, Snowden's Asylum
29th January 2017
- Pre-Emptive Attack Iran Bill Active in US House
28th January 2017
- Ron Paul: 'Remain Vigilant' Regarding Trump Administration
26th January 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Clemency, Surveillance Sharing, Loan Guarantees, Marijuana Delays, Faulty Convictions
21st January 2017
- Hope That Trump Will Be the Peace President That Obama Was Not
19th January 2017
- Breaking: Chelsea Manning to Be Freed in May
17th January 2017
- Andrew Napolitano Meets Donald Trump for Second Time On Supreme Court Nomination
17th January 2017
- Not Just Poland: US Marines Deployed to Norway
16th January 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: US Bombs, Airport Guns, Vaccines Commission, Marijuana Bill, Polluted WaPo
14th January 2017
- Ron Paul Worries of 'Setback of Civil Liberty' with Jeff Sessions as Attorney General
12th January 2017
- Ron Paul: 'Political Grandstanding' Behind Accusations of Russian Hacking of US Election
10th January 2017
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Africa Deployments, 2016 Executions, Maine Marijuana, Less Prisoners, Vermont Pardons
9th January 2017
- Hundreds Of US Tanks Arrive In Europe To Support NATO Anti-Russian Buildup
6th January 2017
- Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Goes to Moscow
5th January 2017
- Libertarian Party Chairman Denounces Ron Paul's Support for States' Rights
3rd January 2017
- 2016
- December
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Punishing Russia, Israel Brouhaha, Marijuana Delay, Troops Suicides, Torture Report
31st December 2016
- 2017 - Ron Paul's New Year Predictions
30th December 2016
- New Russia Sanctions 'Underscore Vindictiveness & Pettiness' of Obama Administration
30th December 2016
- Ask Ron Paul - Tariffs, Populism, Disinfo, And More...
29th December 2016
- Why Lew Rockwell is Optimistic the Drug War Will End
27th December 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Faithless Electors, 'Russian Hack,' Avenue Strategies, Pelosi Vote, Electoral College
23rd December 2016
- Ron Paul: Purported Russian Hack in US Election is Insignificant Compared to What US Does Overseas
22nd December 2016
- Ron Paul Rewind: John Birch Society 50th Anniversary Speech
20th December 2016
- Philippines President Duterte Using China Leverage to Strike Better Aid Deal with Donald Trump?
18th December 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Police Militarization, Canada Marijuana, CIA Chorus, Vermont Pardons, Year End
17th December 2016
- If You Have Nothing to Hide . . .
17th December 2016
- Donald Trump Meets with Judge Andrew Napolitano Regarding Supreme Court Nomination
15th December 2016
- Foreign Policy Hawks Not Ready to Give up Turf
15th December 2016
- Truth About Aleppo: RPI's Daniel McAdams Debates
15th December 2016
- Don't Just Legalize Marijuana, End the Entire Drug War
12th December 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Leon Orr, One-Party Control, NY Marijuana, California Marijuana, Okinawa
10th December 2016
- Rep. Thomas Massie: Judge President Trump on Adherence to Nonaggression Principle
9th December 2016
- Judge Napolitano on Sanctuary Cities' Challenge to US Government Power
8th December 2016
- State Department to Hungary: 'Let NGOs Decide Terrorism Cases'
7th December 2016
- Rebels Lose Aleppo - An End in Sight for Syria War?
6th December 2016
- Washington Post: Pentagon Suppresses its Own Study of $125 Billion in Waste
6th December 2016
- The War on Cash in South Korea
3rd December 2016
- McCarthyism Is Breaking Out All Over
2nd December 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Philippines Killings, DC Swamp, Drug Pleas, Détente Reversals, War Power
2nd December 2016
- November
- They Attack Us for Telling The Truth. Let's Fight Back
29th November 2016
- Ron Paul Advises How Young People Can Advance Liberty
29th November 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Refugee Creation, WaPo Deception, Gun Form, Phone Control, Fidel Castro
27th November 2016
- Ron Paul: The War on Drugs is a War on Liberty, Choice, and Responsibility
24th November 2016
- Ron Paul Questions Whether Donald Trump Will Withstand Pressure in Favor of Foreign Intervention
22nd November 2016
- The War on the First Amendment Didn't Start Last Week
22nd November 2016
- Syrian Rebels Fret Over Trump's Planned Syria Overhaul
19th November 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Neocon Appointments, TPP, Russia Sanctions, Texas Marijuana, Presidential Powers
17th November 2016
- Breaking: Trump, Putin Speak on Telephone; Vow to Improve Relations
14th November 2016
- Ron Paul: The Two-Party System is 'Horrible'
14th November 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Popular Vote, Arms Sales, Marijuana Progress, Ranked Voting, NATO Pushback
13th November 2016
- Ron Paul's Election Day Analysis
9th November 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana Votes, Proposition 63, Drug Pleas, White Privilege, Pirate Party
5th November 2016
- Pentagon Seeks Another $6 Billion for Overseas Troop Deployments
2nd November 2016
- October
- A Pardon for Hillary Clinton
31st October 2016
- Hillary Caught on Tape: 'We Need to Determine Who Wins Before Palestinian Elections Held'
28th October 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Trump Anti-Semitism, PATRIOT Act, Sheldon Adelson, Bill Weld, DEA Spending
28th October 2016
- The End of Interventionism?
25th October 2016
- Doubleheader: Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams on Korelin Economics Report
24th October 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Where's Mosul, Mosul Attack, Norway Marines, Facial Recognition, Kerry's Bombs
23rd October 2016
- The Risks of Clinton's Syrian 'No-Fly Zone'
22nd October 2016
- Lew Rockwell Says Listen to George Washington, Not Obama and Clinton, on Fear of Russia
22nd October 2016
- Turkey Air Raid Kills 200 Kurdish Fighters in Syria
20th October 2016
- Are We Reaching a Tipping Point for Liberty?
19th October 2016
- Peace is an Issue in 2016
19th October 2016
- Dennis Kucinich: FBI Investigation of Hillary Clinton Was Fixed in Her Favor
18th October 2016
- Laurence M. Vance Reviews A Tipping Point for Liberty
14th October 2016
- After Attacking Yemen's Houthis, US Admits They Don't Know Who Fired Missiles
14th October 2016
- The Podesta Emails: Who's to Blame?
14th October 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Pro-Clinton ACLU, Marijuana Poll, Blowback Report, Death Penalty, Kratom Update
14th October 2016
- How Soon Before Armed Drones Are Overhead in America? Time Now.
13th October 2016
- 'Syrian War is Conflict Between West & Russia'
11th October 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Clinton-Weld, Marijuana Worry, Computers Destroyed, Filming Cops, Kratom Update
9th October 2016
- A Desperate Obama Administration Resorts To Lying And Maybe More
8th October 2016
- Ron Paul's Gettysburg College Constitution Day Lecture
6th October 2016
- A Ron Paul Institute Event in Alaska?
5th October 2016
- Ron Paul Comments on the Libertarian and Green Presidential Tickets
4th October 2016
- Jesse Ventura and Lew Rockwell Discuss Ending the War on Marijuana
3rd October 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Marijuana Arrests, Johnson 'Gaffes,' Presidential Debate, NPR Bias, Legal Heroin
2nd October 2016
- September
- Oops They Did it Again: US 'Misdirected' Drone Strike on Somalia Kills 22 Civilians, Soldiers
29th September 2016
- Judge Napolitano: Donald Trump Supports 'Authoritarian Police State' Stop-and-Frisk
29th September 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: WaPo Betrayal, Tulsa Charge, NYPD Cash, Marijuana Defense, Boehner's Bonanza
26th September 2016
- Ron Paul: Clinton and Trump Support More Militarism, Mass Surveillance, and Drug War
23rd September 2016
- In Kerry's Own Words: Syria Prohibited from Attacking al-Qaeda
22nd September 2016
- 'Claims of Russian airstrike on Syrian aid convoy comes at convenient time for US'
21st September 2016
- Breaking: US Military Strikes Syrian Forces, Allowing ISIS to Advance
17th September 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Israel Aid, Anti-Marijuana Dollars, Ballot Access, Guantanamo Vote, Conference Report
17th September 2016
- Politicians Won't Make America Great Again
15th September 2016
- Rep. Thomas Massie Joins the Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board
14th September 2016
- Kerry: US Must Approve All Syrian Airstrikes During Ceasefire
13th September 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Vaccination Mandate, Kratom Ban, Trump Biometrics, NRA Position, Colin Kaepernick
9th September 2016
- Judge Napolitano: FBI Tricked Hillary
8th September 2016
- Donald Trump: We Need More Stop-and-Frisk
5th September 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Clinton's Dictators, Party Principles, Speed Control, Planet K, Sailor Sentenced
2nd September 2016
- August
- The Russians and Sultan Tayyip?
31st August 2016
- Donald Trump's Wall Would Threaten Americans' Freedom
30th August 2016
- Gary Johnson and Bill Weld Presidential Campaign Dragging Libertarianism Through the Mud
28th August 2016
- Ron Paul Nearly Won Electoral College Votes in 2012 Presidential Election
26th August 2016
- How I Was Blacklisted at CNN, and How Easily America Goes to War Now
26th August 2016
- EU Chief Blasts The Very Notion Of National Borders In The Latest Call For Globalism
25th August 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Secretary Romney, Iceland Asylum, Clinton Files, Another Snowden, Fed Wars
24th August 2016
- Breaking: Did Washington Just Declare a 'No Fly' Zone in Syria?
22nd August 2016
- US Warns Syrian Military...For Operating in Syria!
21st August 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Disappearing Trials, Trump's Taxes, Indian Marijuana, Hospital Bombing, Freest States
21st August 2016
- 'Aleppo Child Survivor Image Will be Used as Propaganda for More War - Not Less'
20th August 2016
- Ron Paul: US Intervention Contributes to Risk of Ukraine Fighting Expansion
20th August 2016
- The Aleppo Poster Child
19th August 2016
- Breaking: US Issues Threat as Syria Bombs Rebels Near US Special Forces
19th August 2016
- John McLaughlin, RIP
17th August 2016
- 'Peace and Prosperity 2016' Program Out Now
16th August 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Clinton Assassination, Yemen Bombing, Bill Weld, Iran Cash, VA Pension
13th August 2016
- Trump: Americans May Be Tried In Military Tribunals Under His Administration
12th August 2016
- Afghan Maintenance Program You Pay For Wastes $423 Million
11th August 2016
- The Drug War Built Leviathan Government; Drug War Backlash Can Defeat Leviathan Government
10th August 2016
- The Real Adam Dick Fights For Liberty
5th August 2016
- Ron Paul Recommends Reading This French Book Published in 1850
5th August 2016
- Obama at Pentagon: Syria Mess is All Assad's Fault
4th August 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Khan's Constitution, Philippines Killings, Johnson's Justices, Burp Arrest, Aussie Jedi
4th August 2016
- A Tipping Point for Liberty: An Important and Timely Book
3rd August 2016
- Clinton Admits That It Is 'Fair' To Question Her Truthfulness But Then Denies That The FBI Found That Any Of Her Emails Were Classified
2nd August 2016
- Breaking: US Airstrikes Hit Libya to Bolster UN-Created Government
1st August 2016
- Dennis Kucinich: To Diminish Terrorism, Stop Funding It and Stop Bombing Countries
1st August 2016
- July
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Paul Conventions, Barney Frank, Sanders Supporters, Giuliani Plan, My Book
29th July 2016
- Hillary to Deliver Syria to Jihadists?
29th July 2016
- The Disposable Veterans
28th July 2016
- Robert Wenzel's Early Praise for A Tipping Point for Liberty
27th July 2016
- Dennis Kucinich: Bernie Sanders Should Consider Withdrawing His Hillary Clinton Endorsement
26th July 2016
- Boos and Jeers from Home State Delegation Greet Debbie Wasserman Schultz
25th July 2016
- Like the F-35, US Latest and Most Expensive Aircraft Carrier Doesn't Work
24th July 2016
- Intervention Fail: ISIS Makes Bloody Gains in Post 'Liberation' Afghanistan
24th July 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Convention Infomercial, ISIS War, Clinton Foundation, VP Pence, Medical Marijuana
22nd July 2016
- Milestone: We've Just Dropped Our 50,000th Bomb on ISIS
19th July 2016
- Retaliation for Nice? France Bombs 120 Civilians in Syria
19th July 2016
- Ron Paul: Currency Destruction Funds Wars
18th July 2016
- 'Why They Didn't Fire Is A Mystery' - Coup Pilots Had Erdogan's Plane In Their Sights And Did Nothing
17th July 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Anti-Trump ACLU, 28 Pages, Africa Intervention, Government Schools, Busy Cops
15th July 2016
- Judge Andrew Napolitano: 'Reprehensible' to Label Black Lives Matter as Terrorist Group
13th July 2016
- Ron Paul: No Matter the Presidential Race Outcome, the US Is Going the Way of the USSR
12th July 2016
- Dallas Violence: Wave Of The Future?
11th July 2016
- Ron Paul on the Drug War, Federal Reserve, and Killing of Dallas Cops
10th July 2016
- The Kiev Matrix Doesn't Work in Dallas
9th July 2016
- Defense Spending: Do Presidents Make a Difference?
8th July 2016
- In Dallas, Drone Wars Just Came Home
8th July 2016
- Ron Paul's Take on Patriotism and Independence Day
7th July 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Clinton Cleared, Puppycide, Money Seizing, War Powers, Draft Resistance
7th July 2016
- Ron Paul: Afghanistan a Failure Whether Washington Likes it or Not
6th July 2016
- Blair's Lies On Iraq Exposed. Is W Next?
6th July 2016
- The Latest TSA Horror: This is How They Protect us!
3rd July 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Beyond Brexit, VA Marijuana, Pet Vaccinations, Young Tokers, Gun Database
2nd July 2016
- What the Istanbul Attack Reveals
1st July 2016
- June
- Judge Andrew Napolitano: Nobody Can Accept Attorney General Lynch is Neutral in Clinton Case
30th June 2016
- Ron Paul Predicts Voters Will Be Drawn to Trump and Clinton, Not Libertarian Candidate
29th June 2016
- Another US Proxy Force Defeated By ISIS - Incompetent Training or Intent?
29th June 2016
- President Of The European Parliament: 'It Is Not The EU Philosophy That The Crowd Can Decide Its Fate'
27th June 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: House Sit-In, Naloxone, Pulse Deaths, Michèle Flournoy, RPI Conference
24th June 2016
- Chaos In Congress: Are Guns The Issue?
23rd June 2016
- Israeli Intel Chief: We Don't Want ISIS Defeated in Syria
22nd June 2016
- Clinton Foundation Hack: Amazing Revelations
22nd June 2016
- Ron Paul Speaks Up for Individual Rights on C-SPAN's Washington Journal
22nd June 2016
- War Is Over: US Out Of Okinawa!
21st June 2016
- Ron Paul: Second Party Needed to Counter Republican and Democrat Warmongers
21st June 2016
- Neoconned At State: 'Diplomats' Urge War
20th June 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Bilderberg Academics, Gun Grabbing, Speaker Perk, Women Draft, Orlando Shooting
17th June 2016
- State Department 'Diplomats' Demand War on Assad (and Russia)
17th June 2016
- You Can't Make This Up: Kerry and Saudi Prince Pledge to Fight Extremism After Orlando Shooting
14th June 2016
- No, There Are Not Hundreds of Mass Shootings Each Year in America
12th June 2016
- Kucinich: Cowardly US Leaders Push Endless Cycle of War
11th June 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Fentanyl Scare, Internet Snooping, Muhammad Ali, Drug War, Bilderberg 2016
10th June 2016
- Susan Rice Assures Israel of 'Largest Military Aid Package in American History'
8th June 2016
- Judge Andrew Napolitano's Freedom Watch is Back
7th June 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Neocons4Clinton, Libertarian Spoilers, Marijuana Flip-Flop, David Simpson, More Flags http://bit.ly/1Y0VyPR
5th June 2016
- Obama Hands Corrupt Ukraine Another Billion US Dollars
3rd June 2016
- Washington to Moscow: Stop Targeting al-Qaeda in Syria - You'll Kill Our Moderates!
3rd June 2016
- Ron Paul Wishes Gary Johnson Were 'More of an Outspoken Champion of Liberty'
3rd June 2016
- Ron Paul's Advice at the Libertarian National Convention: Don't Be Wishy-Washy
1st June 2016
- May
- Al-Qaeda Linked Leader Visits US - To Lobby US Government!
27th May 2016
- Breaking: US Soldier in Syria - 'Kill 'em All!'
27th May 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: TSA Kills, Chris Kyle, Granite Nation, Marijuana Billions, McAdams/Raimondo 2020
26th May 2016
- Caught on Film: US Special Forces Fighting on Ground in Syria
26th May 2016
- Ron Paul Praises Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders With Reservations
23rd May 2016
- DNI to Make Recommendation by Today on 28 Pages Declassification
21st May 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: VA Marijuana, Stingy Clemency, Closing Guantanamo, Resisting PreCheck, Bill Weld
21st May 2016
- US Rejects Russia's Call for Joint Strikes Against Syria's al-Qaeda Forces
20th May 2016
- Hidden Mics as Part of Government Surveillance Program
19th May 2016
- Ron Paul: Improved Relations with Cuba and Iran Are 'Best Things that Obama Ever Did'
19th May 2016
- Ron Paul and Nolan Ryan
18th May 2016
- TSA #iHateTheWait Video from Washington Post
18th May 2016
- UN Security Council May Arm Libyan Unity Gov't to Fight ISIS
16th May 2016
- Oops! CIA 'Accidentally' Destroyed Its Only Copy of Senate Torture Report
16th May 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Cliven Bundy, NFL Marijuana, Trump Democrats, Murder Inflation, Giuliani Commission
14th May 2016
- Did you know? US Special Forces Fighting in Libya and Somalia
13th May 2016
- TSA Meltdown: Thousands of Bags Lost While Long Lines Push Passengers To Near Riot
13th May 2016
- 'We Do Investigations Here At The FBI': FBI Director Reportedly Contradicts Clinton On Email Investigation
11th May 2016
- US Can't Say Whether or Not $759 Million Spent on Education in Afghanistan Helped Anything
10th May 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Pushing PreCheck, Plaintiff Killed, Bush's Pledge, Matalin's Party, 28 Pages
8th May 2016
- Film Review: National Bird Looks Deeply in the Drone War's Abyss
7th May 2016
- Breaking: 100 US Troops Land in Yemen?
5th May 2016
- Will Failure to Indict Hillary Clinton Lead to her Replacement on Presidential Ticket?
5th May 2016
- Chelsea Manning: Solitary Confinement is 'No Touch' Torture
3rd May 2016
- April
- NATO Prepares Four Battalions for Russian Border
29th April 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: War Spending, Hawaii Drugs, Sanders Delegates, 28 Pages, Hastert Sentencing
29th April 2016
- In Syria, US Rejects Russia Call to Name al-Qaeda Allies 'Terrorist'
28th April 2016
- State Department Jokesman: 'Obama Never Said No Boots on Ground in Syria!'
25th April 2016
- Breaking: Obama to Announce Major US Escalation in Syria
24th April 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: War Escalation, Canada Marijuana, FBI Hack, EU Regime, Senate Snoopers
23rd April 2016
- 'How the War Party Works': RPI's Daniel McAdams on Mises Weekends
22nd April 2016
- White House 'Concerned' as Russia Moves Equipment to North Syria
22nd April 2016
- Ron Paul on the Military-Industrial Complex's Role in US Militarism from Latin America to Europe
19th April 2016
- Why Don't the Candidates Talk About Afghanistan?
19th April 2016
- 'Humanitarian Interventionist' Convoy Kills Kid in Cameroon
18th April 2016
- Uber Shares Data on 12 Million Riders with Uncle Sam
18th April 2016
- Saudi Arabia Threatens United States: Will Dump US Treasury Holdings, If Congress Passes 9-11 Bill
16th April 2016
- US Troops Near Russia's Border with Daniel McAdams
15th April 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: FBI Creep, Exporting Solitary, Refugee Maker, Superdelegates, President Ryan
15th April 2016
- Syria Elects a Parliament and the Tiger Man Will Lead at Aleppo City
14th April 2016
- Criminal: Former US State Department Official to Buy Ukraine's Largest Telecom Company
13th April 2016
- RPI To Storm Washington? We're Almost There!
12th April 2016
- Ron Paul's Answer to the Question 'What Should I Do?'
11th April 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: President Mattis, Clemency Puffery, Marijuana Rescheduling, Clinton Defense, Waste More
9th April 2016
- US Delivers 3,000 Tons Of Weapons And Ammo To Al-Qaeda & Co in Syria
9th April 2016
- Ron Paul: Prohibiting Remittances to Mexico 'Sounds Like Theft'
8th April 2016
- United States Maintains Banking Sanctions Against Iran
7th April 2016
- Merle Haggard's Peace Song 'America First'
6th April 2016
- See Ron Paul at a Conference This Year? A Few Generous Donors Can Make It Happen!
5th April 2016
- Dozens, Maybe Hundreds, Smoke Marijuana in Front of White House; Two Fined $25 Each
3rd April 2016
- They're at it Again: Pentagon Training New Syrian Rebels
2nd April 2016
- School Bus Bombing?
1st April 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Sanders Wins, Obama Clemencies, Chief Rabbis, Stacked Hearing, Phone Privacy
1st April 2016
- March
- Obama: 'I Don't Want to be Iraq's Air Force...'
31st March 2016
- White House to Syrians: Don't Dare Vote For Assad!
30th March 2016
- Iraq Ranks In Ten Most Corrupt Countries In World, Again
30th March 2016
- A Speech that Would Have Made Waves at AIPAC
29th March 2016
- In Syria, Assad Liberates Palmyra While CIA Battles the Pentagon
28th March 2016
- Media's Blind Spot on War's Victims and Blowback
28th March 2016
- Five Minutes Five Issues: Cuban Cigars, Prohibitionist States, Stopping Trump, Cruz Hypocrisy, DEA Danger
25th March 2016
- Breaking: Heckuva Job, Merkel - ISIS Terror Squads Swarm Europe
23rd March 2016
- Brussels - Unrelated to Interventionist Foreign Policy?
23rd March 2016
- Ron Paul: Trump Will Win Nomination Despite Convention Tricks, but May Face Third-Party Challenger
20th March 2016
- Syrians Free to Choose Future...As Long As Washington Likes Their Choice
18th March 2016
- Ron Paul: Bernie Sanders is Principled, but Not Consistently Antiwar
18th March 2016
- 5M5I: Warmongers Party, Obama Distortion, Trump on War, Lying Cops, Free Speech
17th March 2016
- Judge Napolitano: Obama's Supreme Court Nominee is Pro-Government on Big Constitutional Issues
16th March 2016
- Ron Paul on the ISIS War, Authoritarian Presidential Candidates, Paul's Exercise Routine, and More
14th March 2016
- US Setting Up African Quagmire
13th March 2016
- Don't Put Your Faith in Apple, Judges, or Congress to Protect Your Privacy
11th March 2016
- The Ron Paul Institute Launches New Audio Show: Five Minutes Five Issues
10th March 2016
- Andrew Napolitano Examines Hillary Clinton's 'Continuing Pattern of Lying' in Email Scandal
10th March 2016
- Could An American Soon Be Prime Minister of Ukraine?
9th March 2016
- Bibi Cancels Meeting With Obama, Demands More Money Instead
8th March 2016
- Judge Napolitano: Indictment Certain in Clinton Email Scandal Before November
7th March 2016
- Ron Paul: Disintegration of US Empire Brings Hope for Peaceful Freedom Revolution
3rd March 2016
- Ron Paul: Do Not Compromise Liberty in Encryption Dispute
2nd March 2016
- Dissecting Guantanamo, Migrant Crisis, and iPhone With Tom Woods
2nd March 2016
- Rep. Thomas Massie: Zombie Fighter
2nd March 2016
- Ron Paul: No Change in US Overall Policy No Matter Who Wins Presidential Race
1st March 2016
- Ron Paul Ridicules Media's Super Tuesday Focus on Fake KKK Scandal Instead of Important Issues
1st March 2016
- February
- Pot, Meet Kettle: Ash Carter Says Russia 'Completely Wrongheaded' to Join in Syrian Civil War
28th February 2016
- Guess Who's Violating the Syria Ceasefire?
28th February 2016
- Putting the Ron Paul Institute in Trump's Kitchen Cabinet?
26th February 2016
- HOT: FBI Director Backtracks, Admits Apple iPhone Litigation Will be Precedent!
25th February 2016
- Bernie Sanders' Presidential Campaign Reaches Out to RPI Advisor on Foreign Policy
25th February 2016
- The Incredible Shrinking Syrian 'Ceasefire'
24th February 2016
- Did the FBI Intentionally Bumble the San Bernardino iPhone Investigation?
23rd February 2016
- The Apple Court Order and the Obama Administration's Anti-Privacy Push
21st February 2016
- Showdown: Justice Department Escalates Against Apple
19th February 2016
- Ron Paul Explains Libertarianism
18th February 2016
- Judge Napolitano Applauds Apple's Tim Cook for Defending the Constitution
17th February 2016
- Larry Summers: 'It's Time to Kill the $100 Bill'
16th February 2016
- Has Turkey Just Started WWIII?
15th February 2016
- While Kerry Talks Ceasefire, US Allies Secretly Ship Grad Missiles to Syria Rebels
12th February 2016
- Hillary Clinton Top Aides May Testify Against Her in Clinton Emails Case
12th February 2016
- Ron Paul 'The Maverick' at University of Texas, Arlington
6th February 2016
- UN Rules Julian Assange is 'Arbitrarily Detained'
5th February 2016
- Judge Napolitano: Clinton Espionage Evidence is Overwhelming. Will Obama Block Prosecution?
4th February 2016
- Afghanistan Boondoggles Get Rep. Walter Jones' Goat
3rd February 2016
- The Strange World of The State Department Spokespersons...And a Modest Suggestion
2nd February 2016
- Making the Super Bowl Super Authoritarian
2nd February 2016
- January
- Minnesota GOP Rules Change after Ron Paul Delegates Win May Give Donald Trump the Win
31st January 2016
- You Won't Believe What This US Ambassador Said About al-Qaeda's Syrian Allies
27th January 2016
- Guantánamo Parole Board Clears Victim of Mistaken Identity -- After 13 Years
27th January 2016
- A New Large-Scale US Military Attack in Libya
27th January 2016
- Ron Paul's Upcoming Speeches in Texas
26th January 2016
- Report: Clinton Emails Contained Human Intelligence Classified At Highest Levels
24th January 2016
- Al-Qaeda Allies to Represent Opposition in Upcoming Syria Peace Talks
20th January 2016
- Judge Napolitano: Hard to Believe FBI Won't Recommend Indictment of Hillary
20th January 2016
- Inflation And Banknotes: The War on Money
19th January 2016
- A Video Introduction to Police Militarization
18th January 2016
- That Didn't Take Long: US to Impose New Sanctions on Iran
18th January 2016
- FBI Now Investigating Hillary Clinton for Using State Department to Benefit Clinton Foundation?
15th January 2016
- Hillary's Africa Genocide Problem
14th January 2016
- They Just Can't Stop It: US Planning New Rebel Training Program For Syria
14th January 2016
- Afghan Positions Being Overrun By Taliban Due To Nonexistent "Ghost Soldiers" Used To Funnel Money To Corrupt Afghan Officials
12th January 2016
- A Tribute to Ron Paul's Work for Austrian Economics and against the Federal Reserve
11th January 2016
- Challenging Obama's Gun Control Executive Action
8th January 2016
- A Tale of Two 'Terror Arsonists'
8th January 2016
- Judge Napolitano: Unconstitutional for Obama to Create a New Gun Transfer Crime
6th January 2016
- Delusional State Dept: 'We Brought Peace to Syria in 2015'
4th January 2016
- Killer Cops: Dialing 911 May Be Hazardous to Your Health
2nd January 2016
- 2015
- December
- Ron Paul Rewind: Real ID is National ID
31st December 2015
- Is There a War on Police or a War on Us?
29th December 2015
- US Now World's Top Arms Dealer
28th December 2015
- Federal Court Strikes Down Federal Provision Used To Bar Trademark Protection For Redskins and Other Controversial Names
23rd December 2015
- Will Marijuana Be Rescheduled in 2016?
23rd December 2015
- White House Schizophrenia - Kerry: 'Assad Can Stay'; Obama: 'Assad Must Go'
18th December 2015
- Obama Wants to Take Away Santa's Guns
18th December 2015
- Ron Paul: Save Trillions of Dollars and Millions of Lives by Replacing Militarism with Defense
16th December 2015
- US Foreign Policy of Interminable War to Support the National Security State
14th December 2015
- How About Perjury Prosecutions for Cops Who Lie About Other Cops' Killings?
12th December 2015
- RPI's Adam Dick on the San Bernardino Killings, Mass Murders, Gun Control, Killer Cops, and US Militarism
10th December 2015
- Prayer Request for Ron Paul's Daughter
10th December 2015
- After US Bombers Wipe Out Syrian Village, US Will Investigate Itself
8th December 2015
- Sometimes the Only Thing to Do is Nothing
8th December 2015
- Searching for the 'Lone Wolf'
7th December 2015
- Asset Forfeiture and Police Corruption
4th December 2015
- Dennis Kucinich: 'Stay Tuned' 'I'll Probably Be Back in Elected Office'
3rd December 2015
- Judge Andrew Napolitano: A 'Farce' to Say Mass Surveillance Ended; 'Nothing Has Changed'
2nd December 2015
- Despite What You May Have Heard, Mass Surveillance Continues
1st December 2015
- November
- UAE Sends 'Blackwater' Colombian Mercenaries to Yemen
30th November 2015
- President Ventura?
29th November 2015
- US Census Bureau Has Your Ticket to Internment Camp
27th November 2015
- Why is Turkey Not in Hot Water?
26th November 2015
- The Corporatocracy Behind US Foreign Policy
26th November 2015
- Escalation! Two Russian Aircraft Downed in Syria!
24th November 2015
- Forty Percent of Millennials Favor Censorship of Offensive Speech By Government
23rd November 2015
- Jim Bamford Agrees With Ron Paul
18th November 2015
- Ron Paul: US Troops Will Come Home 'Because We're Flat-Out Broke'
17th November 2015
- Who's Making A Killing From the Paris Terror Attacks?
16th November 2015
- Will Oakland Raiders Linebacker Ray-Ray Armstrong Go to Prison for 'Taunting' a Police Dog?
11th November 2015
- Participating in Class? School Cops Can Arrest You for That Too
6th November 2015
- 'Lawless' Washington Committing Crimes Against Syria – and the US Constitution
6th November 2015
- Middle East Not Going According To Empire Plan
4th November 2015
- Ron Paul Classic: No War in Syria
3rd November 2015
- Is Israel Bombing Syrian Military to Benefit ISIS Near Lebanon?
2nd November 2015
- October
- Peter Van Buren Got it Right: Killed Delta Force Member Used to Build PR for US Ground Troops Announcement
31st October 2015
- Iraq to Washington: We Don't Want Your Troops
28th October 2015
- Niya Kenny is a Brave Young Lady
27th October 2015
- Breaking: Sec Def Tells Congress US to Begin 'Direct Action on the Ground' in Syria and Iraq
27th October 2015
- Washington: Assad Still Must Go
27th October 2015
- The Benghazi Tragedy Is A Result of Bad Ideology
22nd October 2015
- Why Is The US Silently Bombing Syria's Electricity Network?
20th October 2015
- New Report: US Aid to Afghanistan Basically Wasted or Stolen
19th October 2015
- The Danger Of America's Assassination Program
16th October 2015
- Snowden: NSA, GCHQ Using Your Phone to Spy on Others (and You)
15th October 2015
- Into Africa: Obama's Newest War
15th October 2015
- Ron Paul: 'Greatest Resistance' to Federal Reserve Audit is Desire to Keep International Activities Secret
13th October 2015
- How Did ISIS Get All Those Toyota Trucks?
13th October 2015
- Breaking: Washington Airdrops Tons of Weapons to Rebels in Syria
12th October 2015
- Defense Spending Bill: $600 Million More to Train "Moderates" in Syria
10th October 2015
- Ron Paul's Swords into Plowshares Soundtrack
9th October 2015
- Lawrence Wilkerson on the 70 Years Old and Counting US National Security State
8th October 2015
- Russia's Campaign To Snuff Off The CIA's Al-Qaeda Forces
3rd October 2015
- Eric Margolis: US Fight Against 'Covert Western Asset' ISIS is a 'Big Charade'
2nd October 2015
- US-Funded NGO in Syria Uses Old Photo to Claim Civilian Death in Russian Airstrikes
1st October 2015
- Why is Washington Against Russia Bombing ISIS and Al-Qaeda?
1st October 2015
- September
- End the Marijuana 'Sin Taxes'
29th September 2015
- US Exploited Assad's Fight Against Al-Qaeda
24th September 2015
- Washington's Bias Toward War
24th September 2015
- Eric Margolis: When Assad Is Gone, We Will Definitely Miss Him
21st September 2015
- New Hampshire Library Stands Up to US Government, Reinstates Tor Relay
16th September 2015
- Assange, Manning, and Snowden (as Statues) Challenging War in Geneva
14th September 2015
- Ron Paul Discusses Evangelical Zionists' Support for US Wars
12th September 2015
- Foreign Invasion Force In Yemen Grows
11th September 2015
- Ron Paul: The More US Intervention, the More Chaos in the Middle East
10th September 2015
- Daniel McAdams and Tom Woods on The Syrian Refugee Crisis: What's the Cause?
9th September 2015
- Are Manned US Helicopters Flying In Syria?
9th September 2015
- States Can Build Up the Border Police State Too
9th September 2015
- UK Assassinates British Citizens In Syria
8th September 2015
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Using Al-Qaeda to Fight ISIS is Crazy and Dangerous
6th September 2015
- Prisoner Of Conscience? The Case Of The Kentucky Clerk
4th September 2015
- White House: Russian Military Action Against ISIS in Syria Would be 'Destabilizing'
4th September 2015
- The War on Cash
1st September 2015
- Families Choose Homeschooling to Escape Draconian California Vaccination Mandates
1st September 2015
- August
- Judiciary Branch Has Self-Abolished
31st August 2015
- Sexual Assault by the TSA is OK, Except in the Airport Bathroom
28th August 2015
- Telling Your Child to Call 911 in an Emergency Can Be Dangerous
27th August 2015
- NY Times: Why Isn't Obama Backing Al-Qaeda in Syria?
27th August 2015
- Idaho School Bans Confederate Flag On Student's Car
25th August 2015
- Hear Ron Paul, Andrew Napolitano, and Tom Woods from Paul's 80th Birthday Celebration
22nd August 2015
- Syria: Is Israel Planning To Escalate?
21st August 2015
- Hillary Clinton Criminal Charges Coming on the Eve of the New Hampshire Primary?
19th August 2015
- Gullible Americans Forever
18th August 2015
- Police Invincibility Melting Away in Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex
12th August 2015
- Looking Back: Ron Paul's Interviews with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show
9th August 2015
- Reminder: Ron Paul's Birthday Party is Saturday, August 15, and You Are Invited!
8th August 2015
- Judge Andrew Napolitano: Cop Handcuffing Children for Acting Up in School is Assault
5th August 2015
- Lew Rockwell: Ron Paul's New Book on War and Peace is Paul's 'Most Important Book'
5th August 2015
- Hillary's Libyan Torturers
4th August 2015
- Escalation in Syria: Obama To Airstrike Assad?
4th August 2015
- Marines Declare F-35 Fighter 'Operational'
3rd August 2015
- Obama Authorizes War on Assad, Congress AWOL
3rd August 2015
- July
- Obama's Kenya Debacle Shows Folly of Interventionism
29th July 2015
- Breaking: Daniel McAdams on Russia Veto of MH17 Tribunal Proposal at UNSC
29th July 2015
- US Escalation: A No-Fly Zone in Syria?
28th July 2015
- Ron Paul: Look to Switzerland for Path toward Peace
25th July 2015
- Video: TSA Supervisor Threatens Young Man Filming the Patdown Of His Father
24th July 2015
- The Deadly Fallacy of Good Intentions
21st July 2015
- On Social Security? Obama Wants Your Gun!
20th July 2015
- NSA Spies on Enemies...And Friends!
20th July 2015
- 'This Flag Never Goes Down': Amazon Reportedly Takes Down Historical Book On Confederate Flag Due To Confederate Flag On Cover
20th July 2015
- Praise for Swords into Plowshares from Charles Goyette
20th July 2015
- AIPAC Employees Told to Ax Summer Vacation Plans and Gear Up to Fight Iran Deal
19th July 2015
- Obama to Bibi: Want Some (More) Money?
17th July 2015
- Swords into Plowshares: Ron Paul Talks New Book to Alan Colmes
16th July 2015
- Torture Conspiracy: Doctors Collude With CIA
16th July 2015
- Time For a Cleansing
16th July 2015
- Ron Paul Takes on Neocon: 'We've Got a Schizophrenic Foreign Policy'
15th July 2015
- Kiev's Contradictions
15th July 2015
- You Are Invited to Ron Paul's Birthday Party! -- Saturday, August 15 in Lake Jackson, Texas
15th July 2015
- Iran Deal: Peace Opportunity or 'Historic Mistake'
14th July 2015
- Hey, Obama, How About Freeing the Nearly 100,000 Drug War Victims in US Prisons?
13th July 2015
- Whataburger's Gun Discrimination Is Good For Liberty
13th July 2015
- Forget ISIS: Russia and China Biggest Threat Says Pentagon
10th July 2015
- Ron Paul Talks 'Swords into Plowshares' on the Tom Woods Show
9th July 2015
- Army Troop Cuts - A Propaganda Ploy?
8th July 2015
- RPI's Adam Dick Tells Alaska Radio Listeners of Politicians Gone Bad
8th July 2015
- Obama: No Military Solution in Middle East; Increases Bombing Anyway
7th July 2015
- New Ron Paul Book!
7th July 2015
- Greeks Vote No: Keynesian Crisis Continues
6th July 2015
- Will Texas Nix Marriage Licensing? Yes -- if Rep. David Simpson Gets His Way
6th July 2015
- Hillary Arms Terrorists, Greece Wastes $ on Military: Week in Review With McAdams and Taylor
5th July 2015
- On Celebrating Dependence Day
4th July 2015
- Andrew Napolitano: Hillary Clinton Armed Terrorists and Lied to Congress about It
2nd July 2015
- The Tunisia Massacre and the Irish-ISIS Connection
2nd July 2015
- California Über Alles: Gov. Jerry Brown's Onerous Vaccination Mandates
1st July 2015
- June
- Turkey May Invade Syria, But to Stop the Kurds, Not ISIS
30th June 2015
- Guess How Many 'Moderate' Syrian Rebels Have Been Trained With Congress-Approved $500 Million?
30th June 2015
- Armenia Color Revolution? Germany Urged to Build Up Military. Week in Review with McAdams and Taylor
28th June 2015
- Sec Def Carter to Russia: 'Don't Drag Us Back to the Past'
22nd June 2015
- Macedonia Caves, Congress Slumbers, NATO Moves to Russia Border - McAdams and Taylor's Week in Review
20th June 2015
- Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell on Their Decades Promoting Liberty and Shared Optimism for the Future
20th June 2015
- Judge Napolitano: What if the US Consulate in Benghazi was a Terrorist Weapons Warehouse?
18th June 2015
- Former NSA Director Michael Hayden: It's 'Cool!' That Congress Has Not Restrained Mass Surveillance
17th June 2015
- Your Money Flushed Away in Afghanistan...
17th June 2015
- South Dakota Native American Tribe Legalizes Marijuana
17th June 2015
- Planet Jeb
16th June 2015
- Small Victory: Decades-Old Database of Nevada Handgun Owners to be Destroyed
15th June 2015
- US Joint Chief Dempsey to Israel: We Will Defend You
11th June 2015
- Judge Napolitano: Prosecute 'Hothead' McKinney Pool Party Cop
10th June 2015
- Saudi Arabia's Human Rights Campaign
9th June 2015
- CIA Director: Blowback is Real
7th June 2015
- Judge Napolitano: Why the NSA Loves the USA FREEDOM Act
4th June 2015
- Here We Go: FBI Probes Awarding of Russia World Cup
4th June 2015
- Walter Jones Targeted by Neocons
2nd June 2015
- May
- US Gives ISIS a Billion Dollars In Mosul
31st May 2015
- Speaker John Boehner's Endless Excuses for Blocking an ISIS War Debate and Vote
31st May 2015
- Judge Andrew Napolitano: Mass Surveillance Will Continue Even Without PATRIOT Act Section 215
28th May 2015
- The Conscientious Objector's Path Away from War's Killings
27th May 2015
- ISIS Gains as Congress Funds War: Week in Review With McAdams and Taylor
24th May 2015
- Lew Rockwell: 'If You're Not Seeing the Ron Paul Liberty Report, You're Not Understanding What's Going On'
24th May 2015
- Michael Scheuer: Why Bin Laden Was Reading My Book 'Imperial Hubris'
22nd May 2015
- Rep. John Duncan: GOP as War Party is a 'Recipe for Defeat'
19th May 2015
- 'Any Time US Official Visits Ukraine, Some Attack Happens Afterward'
19th May 2015
- Jacob Hornberger's Outstanding Jury Nullification Overview
18th May 2015
- NATO-Funded NGO Urges Info-War With Russia
15th May 2015
- NATO: 'We Are The World'
14th May 2015
- Sen. Bob Corker Thinks the NSA Is Collecting Too Little of Our Private Information!
14th May 2015
- Pentagon Paid NFL Teams to Thank Troops at Games
11th May 2015
- NATO War Games, NSA Spying, Yemen Dying: Week in Review with Jay Taylor and Daniel McAdams
9th May 2015
- Judge Andrew Napolitano's Two-Minute Case against Extending Expiring PATRIOT Act Provisions
8th May 2015
- Radical Texas Marijuana Legalization Bill Passes in State House Committee
7th May 2015
- Thank the US-backed Saudi Attack for the Rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Yemen
6th May 2015
- A Documentary Worthy of Ron Paul
6th May 2015
- Ron Paul's Big Announcement
5th May 2015
- Reps. Jones and McGovern In-Depth Discussion of Congress' Constitutional War Powers
5th May 2015
- CIA Boss: We Were Heroes in Error
5th May 2015
- Gen. Breedlove Pushes Senate to Arm Ukraine...And More?
1st May 2015
- Kerry 'Issuing a Warning' to EU on Russia Sanctions
1st May 2015
- Ron Paul Rewind: Oppose PATRIOT Act Renewal, Respect the Fourth Amendment
1st May 2015
- April
- Andrew Napolitano on Unjustifiable Killings of Americans in Baltimore and Overseas
29th April 2015
- George W. Bush: Don't Talk to Iran!
28th April 2015
- Ron Paul: End the Fed that Funds Perpetual War and Puts War Profiteers on the Gravy Train
27th April 2015
- Kansas One-Ups Texas by Adopting Concealed Carry without Classes, Fees, or a Surveillance Database
24th April 2015
- US Funded Industrial Park in Afghanistan Found With Only One Business and No Electricity . . . And Missing Records
24th April 2015
- The Drug War and the Prison-Industrial Complex
23rd April 2015
- Are We Really Winning Against ISIS?
23rd April 2015
- VA Sending Veterans' Mental Health Information to the FBI to Aid Gun Restrictions
22nd April 2015
- Don't Take Our Raisins! An Introduction to American Takings Law
22nd April 2015
- Ukraine's American Finance Minister Asks John McCain for Weapons
21st April 2015
- US Warships in Yemen. Why?
21st April 2015
- Ron Paul: 'NATO's an Entangling Alliance We'd Be Better Off Without'
21st April 2015
- More Repercussions From US/European Militarism
21st April 2015
- Ukraine: Killing the Opposition?
19th April 2015
- US to Widely Export Killer Drones
17th April 2015
- US Military Lands in Ukraine
15th April 2015
- Ending Vaccination Mandate Exemptions in Australia and the US
14th April 2015
- Canadian Cowards, Yemen Unraveling - McAdams and Taylor Week in Review
12th April 2015
- Gov. Charlie Baker Applauds US Government Circumventing State Law to Execute Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
11th April 2015
- How the War on Drugs Facilitated the Global War on Terrorism
8th April 2015
- Toronto Symphony Orchestra Goes Full Stalin
6th April 2015
- Guess Who's Loving Saudi Bombs in Yemen?
4th April 2015
- The Iran Deal Deconstructed - RPI's Daniel McAdams With Jay Taylor
3rd April 2015
- March
- As Civilian Deaths Mount in Yemen, US Pledges Saudi Attackers More Support
30th March 2015
- When it's OK to Bomb Your Own People
28th March 2015
- Norman Singleton Discusses the Terrible Way the PATRIOT Act Became Law
26th March 2015
- The Interventionist Holocaust
26th March 2015
- Melkite Church Patriarch: Please Stop Bombing Us
24th March 2015
- Why Washington Provides Neither Peace Nor Prosperity
23rd March 2015
- Twelve Years After Start of Iraq War, Neocons Still on Top
20th March 2015
- RPI's McAdams on Ukraine's New Special Operations Law
19th March 2015
- 'Shock and Awe' Twelve Years On: Flashback to My Iraq War Opposition
19th March 2015
- So...Assad Can Stay?
16th March 2015
- NATO on Russia's Borders, Sen. Cotton Letter, Ron Paul's Coming Book, and More - McAdams and Taylor Week in Review
15th March 2015
- Roll Call on Ron Paul's '76 Swagger
13th March 2015
- NATO's Massive Show of Force in Latvia - What's the Endgame?
12th March 2015
- Al-Qaeda, Our Ally?
11th March 2015
- War as a Crime Against Civilization
9th March 2015
- German Intel: Breedlove is Bonkers!
8th March 2015
- Nuland's Neocon Lies and McCain's Agony - McAdams and Taylor Week in Review
7th March 2015
- Hillary Mann Leverett on Netanyahu's Nearly 20 Years of Scaremongering Americans
5th March 2015
- Neocon Nuland Lies About Ukraine Before Congress
5th March 2015
- The Netanyahu Speech and the Neocons - A Discussion With Tom Woods and Daniel McAdams
4th March 2015
- Texas Legislator Introduces Bill to Treat Marijuana 'Like Tomatoes, Jalapeños, or Coffee'
3rd March 2015
- On Marijuana, Young Republicans Say 'Legalize it' but Congressional Republicans Say 'No'
3rd March 2015
- February
- Judge Napolitano: NSA Is Doing What American Colonists Fought Britain to End
27th February 2015
- Former NSA and CIA Boss Michael Hayden Calls Himself an 'Unrelenting Libertarian'
27th February 2015
- The Origins of ISIS
27th February 2015
- Internet, RIP?
26th February 2015
- NATO's Russia Border Games
25th February 2015
- The Chris Kyle Verdict and The Mistreatment of Our Veterans
25th February 2015
- US, UK, Kiev in Violation of Minsk Agreement?
24th February 2015
- Ukraine's Very Suspicious Weapons 'Purchase'
24th February 2015
- State Department's Jen Psaki as Baghdad Bob
21st February 2015
- Ukraine Year One, Syria Rebel Booster Changes Tune and More - RPI's McAdams and Jay Taylor Week in Review
21st February 2015
- Gen. Wesley Clark: 'ISIS Got Started With Funding From Our Closest Allies'
19th February 2015
- Upcoming: Ron Paul's New Book on War
17th February 2015
- UK Supplies Saxon APCs to Ukraine...Which Promptly Sells Them!
16th February 2015
- Andrew Napolitano: IRS Commissioner Apologizing for Seizing Bank Accounts Is Not Enough
16th February 2015
- Who is Violating Minsk II? President's AUMF = Total War - McAdams and Taylor Week in Review
14th February 2015
- The Fed's Attack Dog is At It Again
13th February 2015
- 'Minsk II' - What About Foreign Troops in Ukraine?
12th February 2015
- Lawrence Wilkerson: Resist 'Warmonger' John McCain's Call to Arm Ukraine
11th February 2015
- When Barack Called Vladimir...
10th February 2015
- Burning Jordanians, Total War, Arms for Ukraine, Europe Peace Plan? - McAdams and Taylor Week in Review
9th February 2015
- In Praise of Grover Cleveland
7th February 2015
- Andrew Napolitano: In a Free Society You Can Reject the Vaccination 'Scientific Orthodoxy'
5th February 2015
- Is Privatizing the Afghan War a Feasible Exit Strategy...
5th February 2015
- King Abdullah's Crocodile Tears Over Burned Pilot
4th February 2015
- Oops They Did it Again: 'Moderate' Syrian Rebels Join Jihadists
2nd February 2015
- Obama Admits US Role in Ukraine Overthrow
2nd February 2015
- Who Started Ukraine? Max Boot's War. And More. McAdams and Taylor Week in Review
1st February 2015
- January
- The Horrible Foolishness of Sanctions: Ron Paul Talks to Lew Rockwell
31st January 2015
- Sharia Law in Texas?
31st January 2015
- To Stop Tracking of Car Movements, States Can End License Plate Requirement
30th January 2015
- Yemen Coup and the Week in Review -- McAdams and Taylor
25th January 2015
- Foreign Troops in Ukraine? You Bet!
23rd January 2015
- Kucinich: Obama's Wars Stand in Way of His SOTU Wish List
22nd January 2015
- Breaking the Mold: Rick Sanchez Interviews Ron Paul
22nd January 2015
- Is The FBI Busting Terror Plots or Creating Terror Plots?
20th January 2015
- Free Speech, Paris, False Flag, US Training to Syrian Rebels - McAdams and Taylor's Foreign Policy Week in Review
17th January 2015
- Ron Paul: What is Really Behind Violent Police Confrontations in US Cities?
14th January 2015
- After Free Speech Rally, France Cracks Down on Free Speech
14th January 2015
- Civilian Bus Attacked in Ukraine, Washington Blames Rebels
14th January 2015
- Hypocrisy of the Paris Marchers
13th January 2015
- Paris Attack, Blowback, is Ron Paul Right? - McAdams and Taylor Week in Review
10th January 2015
- Michael Scheuer: The Paris Killings Are Blowback
8th January 2015
- How Many Current US Wars? Let's Ask Obama...
4th January 2015
- North Korea Sanctions? Afghan Victory? McAdams and Jay Taylor Week in Review
3rd January 2015
- The Evil of Sanctions
3rd January 2015
- Oliver Stone: CIA Fingerprints All Over Ukraine Coup
1st January 2015
- 2014
- December
- Students for Liberty: The 'Regime Change' Libertarians
26th December 2014
- Russia Sanctions and Shifting Cuba Policy - McAdams and Taylor's Week in Review
20th December 2014
- Report: Afghanistan War Reaches $1 Trillion And Will Require Hundreds of Billions More
15th December 2014
- New US Bill Arms Ukraine, Adds Sanctions -- RPI's McAdams on RT
15th December 2014
- Meaning of Torture Report: Simply a Catharsis? - Daniel McAdams and Jay Taylor
14th December 2014
- Rep. Walter Jones: Omnibus Bill? Are You Kidding? I Don't Even Know What's In It!
13th December 2014
- The US Must Purge Itself
11th December 2014
- House Russia Bill, New SecDef, Hungary Regime Change: Foreign Policy Week in Review
7th December 2014
- The Anatomy of Regime Change
6th December 2014
- State Spokesperson: 'Our Line is Ridiculous...'
5th December 2014
- What Would SecDef Ashton Carter Mean for the Military?
4th December 2014
- ISIS: Another Chapter in the Forever War
4th December 2014
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Want to Help Injured Veterans? Stop Interminable War
3rd December 2014
- November
- Weapons to Ukraine? Assad Overthrow? RPI's Daniel McAdams Speaks With Jay Taylor
29th November 2014
- Gen. Breedlove Announces More Aid to Ukraine Military, Denounces Russian 'Militarization'
26th November 2014
- Breaking: Hagel Out, Assad Next
24th November 2014
- Obama's Stealth Surge in Afghanistan
22nd November 2014
- Fmr. Bush National Security Advisor: Start WWIII With Russia!
22nd November 2014
- Dennis Kucinich: Support for War and National Security State is Reason for Democrat Election Losses
21st November 2014
- Who Stole Ukraine's Gold?
20th November 2014
- Ed Mullins Returns with More Marijuana Nonsense Talk
18th November 2014
- Another US-Supported Group Goes Over to ISIS
18th November 2014
- Students For Liberty: The 'Libertarian' Arm of the Regime Change Machine
16th November 2014
- Ron Paul: Congress Approves ISIS War Funding While Ducking Vote on War Itself
16th November 2014
- Ron Paul: 'The Militarism of Big Government is Coming to an End'
13th November 2014
- Obama Wants More Money for Syria Rebels
12th November 2014
- Success? US Plans to Evacuate Embassy in Yemen
11th November 2014
- Asset Forfeiture: A Cop Shopping Spree
11th November 2014
- For Armistice Day, Ron Paul on the Federal Reserve's Role in Financing US Militarism
11th November 2014
- Fifty Years Later, Obama to Re-Play Vietnam?
10th November 2014
- What Do The Elections Really Mean? Listen To Ron Paul and Charles Goyette
8th November 2014
- Is NYT Growing Weary of Kiev?
7th November 2014
- Ron Paul and Jay Taylor on How Peace Brings Prosperity
6th November 2014
- Alaska, DC, and Oregon Voters Legalize Marijuana
5th November 2014
- Is Kiev Preparing Another Attack?
3rd November 2014
- October
- Scream! Top Ten Government Things to Be Afraid of for Halloween
31st October 2014
- RPI: Still Lean and Mean...But Growing!
30th October 2014
- What Putin Said -- RPI's McAdams and Jay Taylor Discuss
28th October 2014
- Ron Paul on the Selective Service System's Psychological Manipulation
25th October 2014
- John Stossel Demolishes Old Saw about Libertarians as 'Spoilers' for Republican Candidates
25th October 2014
- Will 'Indispensable' West Consider Putin's Latest Speech?
24th October 2014
- Eric Margolis: Formerly 'Liked Everywhere' Canada Has Moved 'Into the Gun Sights'
23rd October 2014
- 35,000 People and Counting on New York's New 'No Guns List'
23rd October 2014
- Ebola, Putin, German Spooks, NATO, etc. -- Daniel McAdams With Jay Taylor
22nd October 2014
- We Tortured Some Folks...And Thinking About Torturing Some More Folks
20th October 2014
- Germany Knows Who Shot Down Flight MH-17?
20th October 2014
- White House 'Inherently Resolved' to Defeat ISIS
16th October 2014
- Phony ISIS Fight and Ukraine's Gas Problems -- McAdams and Taylor on Real News of Week
14th October 2014
- Khorasan Group: Anatomy of Propaganda
14th October 2014
- New Post
12th October 2014
- Crimes and Hope: Ron Paul's Conversation With Lew Rockwell
11th October 2014
- How Much is Obama's War on ISIS Going to Cost? You Don't Want to Know!
10th October 2014
- Is Turkey Playing Chicken With US on ISIS Fight?
9th October 2014
- Businessmen Shut Down Hong Kong Protests? Daniel McAdams with Jay Taylor
8th October 2014
- Operation Voldemort: The War Which Must Not Be Named
7th October 2014
- Libya Up Next (Again) On Obama's 'Bomb the World' Tour?
6th October 2014
- 'Comply Or Die' is Not The Law
6th October 2014
- Surveying the Empire: RPI's Daniel McAdams on the Robert Wenzel Show
5th October 2014
- Israel Lobby Supports Jabhat Al-Nusra, Insurgents In Aleppo Surrounded
3rd October 2014
- Ron Paul: Republican Majority in US Senate Would Not Make Much Difference
2nd October 2014
- Ron Paul: Technology for Liberty, Not War
1st October 2014
- The Empire on the Warpath -- McAdams and Taylor on Syria, Hong Kong, and More
1st October 2014
- September
- Does Obama's 'Pivot to Asia' Include Regime Change For China?
30th September 2014
- Hilarious German Satire of Anti-Russian Propaganda
26th September 2014
- Whistleblowers Expose NSA-Partner Israel's Corrupt Use of Surveillance Information
24th September 2014
- US War on Syria, Day Two: Civilian Casualties, New Scarier Group Hit, Israel Joins
23rd September 2014
- Andrew Napolitano: US Using Gun Transfer Forms to Violate Free Speech and Privacy
22nd September 2014
- Prof. Flynt Leverett Dissects Obama's 'Insane' Commitment to Never-Ending Middle East War
19th September 2014
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Derides US Support of "Moderate" Syria Insurgents
16th September 2014
- Mainstream Media Hypocrisy: 'Where Are the Antiwar Voices?'
15th September 2014
- Australia Senator, Greens Party Leader Christine Milne Opposes ISIS War, Warns of Blowback
14th September 2014
- Obama's Syrian 'Moderates' Sign Non-Aggression Pact with ISIS
13th September 2014
- One Party Interventionist State -- Ron Paul With Charles Goyette
12th September 2014
- Shorter Obama War Speech...The Top Five List
11th September 2014
- Iraq: Done; Libya: Done; Now for Syria! -- Daniel McAdams with Jay Taylor Radio
10th September 2014
- Dennis Kucinich: US Lying and Manipulating Fear to Justify War on ISIS
10th September 2014
- Obama to Secretly Arm Kiev?
9th September 2014
- NATO to Ship Weapons to Kiev -- But Don't Call it Escalation!
4th September 2014
- Mr. Cantor Goes to Wall Street
3rd September 2014
- Don't Blink, You'll Miss Another US Attack!
2nd September 2014
- August
- Well Done Hillary, Islamists are Swimming in Our Pool!
31st August 2014
- Russian 'Soldiers Mothers Committees' -- a US Covert Op?
30th August 2014
- About That Russian Invasion...
29th August 2014
- Ron Paul and Charles Goyette: Syria and Iraq the Fruits of Interventionism
29th August 2014
- Freedom and Moose on Patriot's Lament in Alaska
29th August 2014
- Is a Nationwide Local Government Backlash Against Police Militarization Beginning?
28th August 2014
- Liberty Across the Board: Ron Paul vs Boston Globe on The Right to Use Heroin
28th August 2014
- Ron Paul Challenging Government Secrecy and the "Truther" Label
24th August 2014
- Against The Murder Machine: Daniel McAdams on the Lew Rockwell Show
23rd August 2014
- Islamist Rise and The Fall of Tripoli Airport
23rd August 2014
- Ron Paul: The Battle is Between Liberty and Interventionism, Not Republicans and Democrats
22nd August 2014
- Send Sunil Dutta Back to the Police Academy or Not
21st August 2014
- Mission Creep in Iraq, More Mayhem in Ukraine -- Daniel McAdams on Jay Taylor Show
21st August 2014
- Eric Margolis: US Manipulating Afghanistan Election to Extend US Military Presence
19th August 2014
- Who's Zoomin' Who in Novorossiya?
19th August 2014
- To Stop War, Set Money Free!
19th August 2014
- Dennis Kucinich: US Fueled Christian Persecution in Iraq; More Intervention Is Not the Answer
13th August 2014
- Selective Humanitarianism and the Week in War -- McAdams and Taylor Discuss
12th August 2014
- Did 'Non-Interventionists' Drink the 'Bomb Iraq' Kool-Aid? -- Daniel McAdams on Tom Woods Show
11th August 2014
- Cold Winter: Will Ukraine Cut Off Russian Oil to Europe?
11th August 2014
- US Sends Humanitarian Bombs to Iraq as it Warns Russia Against Humanitarian Aid to Ukraine
8th August 2014
- NY Times Truncated Ron Paul History Puts Libertarians in Republican Box
8th August 2014
- Big PR's Info Wars
8th August 2014
- Andrew Napolitano: Obama Appears 'Out to Lunch' Regarding CIA Spying on Congress
6th August 2014
- The Anatomy of Propaganda: Ukraine, CIA, WWIII, and the Power of Social Media
5th August 2014
- Ukraine Antiwar Movement Grows
4th August 2014
- Did Ukraine Shoot Down the Plane?
3rd August 2014
- July
- US Grants Israel Emergency Access to Billion Dollar US Weapons Cache
31st July 2014
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Exposes the CIA's Ongoing Cover-Up of Torture War Crimes
30th July 2014
- Another One-Sided Israel Vote Scheduled Today In Congress
30th July 2014
- Abolish the CIA: Does Ron Paul Hate America? Daniel McAdams on Jay Taylor Show
29th July 2014
- Robert Higgs: The Many Costs of War
27th July 2014
- Eric Margolis: 'Blame for this Bloodbath Sits as Much With the US as it Does With Israel'
24th July 2014
- Fixing Facts Around The Policy: Is the US Government Manipulating Social Media?
23rd July 2014
- US Support For Ukraine Regime Change -- Daniel McAdams With Jay Taylor
23rd July 2014
- Attacking Ron Paul, National Journal Hits New Lows
22nd July 2014
- We Made It To A Million!
21st July 2014
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Reject 'Raving Maniac' John McCain; Cooler Heads Can Create Ukraine Peace
21st July 2014
- RPI's Daniel McAdams on Laura Ingraham Show
20th July 2014
- New Post
20th July 2014
- Ron Paul: Don't Blame Putin For Malaysian Jet Shoot Down
18th July 2014
- Dennis Kucinich: Congress Should Recognize That Palestinians Exist
17th July 2014
- Ron Paul: 'Who Are the Real Isolationists?'
17th July 2014
- Tired of US Spying, Germany? Here's Some Good Advice...
16th July 2014
- Is NATO The Ghost of Brezhnev? Daniel McAdams Back on Jay Taylor Show
16th July 2014
- Dennis Kucinich: Americans 'Have to Break the War Culture'
15th July 2014
- Eric Cantor's Final Assault
13th July 2014
- Dennis Kucinich on America's Dangerous, Anti-Democratic Path
10th July 2014
- Is It A Crime To Insult the Police?
8th July 2014
- Is Brzezinski Pushing Ethnic Cleansing for Eastern Ukraine?
3rd July 2014
- Ron Paul: US Threatening Greater Middle East War, Stock Market Crash, and Oil and Gold Rise
3rd July 2014
- Ukraine's Chocolate King Oligarch -- Daniel McAdams on Scott Horton Show
1st July 2014
- June
- RPI's Adam Dick Discusses the Drug War, Elections, and Smokey and the Bandit on the Lions of Liberty Podcast
26th June 2014
- Despite $72 Billion Intel Collection Budget, US Has No Clue About Iraq
26th June 2014
- 'Your Tax Money to Arm The Jihad': Ron Paul Speaks With Charles Goyette
22nd June 2014
- Rep. Walter Jones on Foreign Policy: 'We in America are in the Eleventh Hour'
21st June 2014
- Ron Paul Appears in Movies Based on Novels Atlas Shrugged and Alongside Night
19th June 2014
- Judge Andrew Napolitano: No New US War in Iraq
19th June 2014
- Ethnic Cleansing Coming in East Ukraine -- McAdams Speaks WIth Scott Horton
18th June 2014
- Is Ron Paul the San Antonio Spurs of American Politics?
16th June 2014
- Ron Paul: Help Neither the Iraq Government Nor the Insurgents
14th June 2014
- State Department Claims Russian Tanks in Ukraine
13th June 2014
- Fall of Saigon Moment for US Embassy Baghdad?
13th June 2014
- Iraq to US: 'Please Bomb Us Again'; Obama: 'OK'
12th June 2014
- Ron Paul Alumni Meet on Jay Taylor Show to Talk War and Peace
12th June 2014
- Iraq Falls to ISIS? -- Daniel McAdams on Tom Woods Show Today!
11th June 2014
- Ron Paul: Legal Pot, Not SWAT
10th June 2014
- US Support for Lugansk Massacre -- Daniel McAdams on the Scott Horton Show
10th June 2014
- John Kerry Caught in Lie to Promote War With Russia
8th June 2014
- Washington Post At War With Reality on Ukraine
8th June 2014
- Ron Paul on 'The Strange Case of Bowe Bergdahl'
6th June 2014
- Have You Reset the Net?
6th June 2014
- Obama and Cameron Issue Putin an Ultimatum
5th June 2014
- Judge Napolitano: NSA Intercepting Private Photos 'Blatantly Violates the Constitution'
3rd June 2014
- Obama Declares 'Holy War' in Poland
3rd June 2014
- May
- Sorry Obama, America is With Ron Paul
30th May 2014
- Lew Rockwell: Central Banks Make World Wars Possible
28th May 2014
- Patriotic Blasphemy
27th May 2014
- Can Kinky Friedman Bring Legal Marijuana and Hemp to Texas?
26th May 2014
- Walter Block's Libertarian Journey: Booing Ayn Rand and Playing Risk with Murray Rothbard
26th May 2014
- Memorial Day and the Meaning of Freedom
26th May 2014
- Judge Napolitano on Obama Helping 'Targeted Killings Memo' Author Become Judge
22nd May 2014
- Toothless USA FREEDOM Act Losing Support
21st May 2014
- How's Libya These Days? Daniel McAdams and Jay Taylor on US Foreign Policy Successes
21st May 2014
- NATO Aims To Repeat Its Libya 'Success' In Ukraine
17th May 2014
- Ron Paul: The Ukraine Fuse Has Been Lit
16th May 2014
- White House Flip-Flop: Voting Now Crucial in Ukraine!
16th May 2014
- Ron Paul Praises States' Nullification of US Marijuana Prohibition
15th May 2014
- Ukraine Deteriorates: Daniel McAdams With Jay Taylor
13th May 2014
- Is Today 'Lie about Ron Paul in Headlines Day'?
13th May 2014
- Ron Paul: Victory For Peace Candidate Walter Jones is Great News
12th May 2014
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Oligarchs Run US Foreign Policy
11th May 2014
- Ron Paul on the Benghazi Partisan Sideshow
9th May 2014
- Who's Behind Odessa? RPI's Daniel McAdams on Scott Horton Show
8th May 2014
- Pussy Riot on Capitol Hill
6th May 2014
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Ukraine Rhetoric and Sanctions Threatening World War
4th May 2014
- 'Free Press'? USAID Increases Funding to Pro-Kiev Media
3rd May 2014
- US Media Covers Up Mass Murder in Odessa
3rd May 2014
- Rep. Walter Jones' Refreshing Voting Philosophy
3rd May 2014
- Ron Paul: 'State Department's Free Press Hypocrisy'
1st May 2014
- Happy Loyalty Day
1st May 2014
- April
- Pulling Back Mainstream Media Curtain: RPI's Daniel McAdams and Jay Taylor Broadcast
30th April 2014
- 'You Must Hate RT!' Demands Latest State Department Propaganda
29th April 2014
- Al-Qaeda Rules in 'Liberated' Libya
26th April 2014
- Time to Attack Kuwait?
26th April 2014
- Ron Paul on The Authoritarian State
25th April 2014
- Judge Napolitano on BLM's Unconstitutional Texas Land Grab
25th April 2014
- Ron Paul: 'Why Are We Droning Yemen?'
24th April 2014
- Eastern Ukraine is Blowback for Kiev: McAdams on Jay Taylor Show
23rd April 2014
- Judge Napolitano: Hooray for Obama's Clemency for Nonviolent Drug War Prisoners
22nd April 2014
- Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan With Charles Goyette: What a Show!
18th April 2014
- Sen. Reid Ups Threats Against Bundy Ranch Protestors, Calling Them 'Domestic Terrorists'
18th April 2014
- Ron Paul on 'The Independents' -- But Why The Blindside?
17th April 2014
- Judge Napolitano: Bundy Ranch Protestors' Line in the Sand Stops Thieving Feds
15th April 2014
- Washington's Outrageous Ukraine Double Standards
12th April 2014
- Ron Paul: The Senate CIA Report And Torture
12th April 2014
- Ron Paul: US Threatens Challengers to Dollar Hegemony
11th April 2014
- Lew Rockwell's Pessimistic Optimism
11th April 2014
- RPI Editorial Policy: A Note of Clarification
10th April 2014
- How the State Department Spends Your Money
9th April 2014
- 'Foot-in-Mouth' Kerry's Nixonian Blunder
9th April 2014
- Ron Paul: 'Hands Off Raw Milk!'
7th April 2014
- Eric Margolis: US Afghanistan Elections Not Up To Standard of Soviet Afghanistan Elections
6th April 2014
- Ron Paul: How The Aid to Ukraine Scam Works
5th April 2014
- Ron Paul: What the Media Won't Say About the Latest Ft. Hood Tragedy
4th April 2014
- Zombie NATO
4th April 2014
- Origins of NATO Expansion -- Daniel McAdams on Jay Taylor Show
3rd April 2014
- Ron Paul: US and IMF Bailout of Ukraine is a Bankers Bailout
3rd April 2014
- Daddy Warbucks Seeks President
2nd April 2014
- Infantile Diplomacy and Double Standards
1st April 2014
- March
- Obama's War On History
29th March 2014
- Col. Wilkerson: 'What American Wants to Die for Kiev?'
27th March 2014
- The TSA PreCheck Extortion Racket
27th March 2014
- Obama Descends to Comedy
26th March 2014
- Democracy Promotion or Total Destruction?
26th March 2014
- Ron Paul: 'The Neocons Are Hysterical'
24th March 2014
- New Post
21st March 2014
- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: How to Avoid War Over Ukraine
20th March 2014
- Foiled in Crimea, Is Obama Eyeing Syria Strike?
18th March 2014
- Ron Paul: Crimea Secedes. So What?
17th March 2014
- Ron Paul Gives John Kerry a Reading Assignment
16th March 2014
- Judge Napolitano: Congress and CIA Relationship at 'Turning Point'
14th March 2014
- Russia Gets it Wrong
12th March 2014
- Geoffrey Pyatt: The Outlaw as Sheriff
11th March 2014
- The Empire's Meddling In Ukraine
9th March 2014
- Did Russia Invade Crimea?
8th March 2014
- Dennis Kucinich and Lawrence Wilkerson Expose US Role in Creating Ukraine Crisis
6th March 2014
- Ron Paul Reports Ukraine Story the Mainstream Media is Suppressing
6th March 2014
- Kerry to Russia: You Can't Just Invade a Country on False Pretences
3rd March 2014
- America Agrees With Ron Paul on Ukraine
3rd March 2014
- Ron Paul: Don't Just Cut Troops, 'Downsize' US Foreign Policy
1st March 2014
- February
- RPI's Adam Dick Addresses the Rise of Libertarians in American Politics
25th February 2014
- Did Susan Rice Just Threaten Russia With War?
23rd February 2014
- Ron Paul to President Obama: Snowden is Perfect Example for Granting Clemency
23rd February 2014
- Ron Paul Discusses Snowden Clemency Petition and Foreign Policy In Depth
21st February 2014
- Ukraine Is Responsible For Its Demise...But We All May Suffer
21st February 2014
- Judge Andrew Napolitano: DHS License Plate Tracking is Right Out of East Germany
20th February 2014
- Why Does Ukraine Seem So Much Like Syria?
19th February 2014
- Ron Paul Podcast: Busted! US Officials Caught Meddling in Ukraine
15th February 2014
- US/UN Fears Assad Win in Free Syrian Election?
12th February 2014
- Who is Victoria Nuland? RPI's McAdams Joins Jay Taylor to Explain
12th February 2014
- RPI on Antiwar Radio: Nuland, Ukraine, Syria and More
12th February 2014
- US Aid Arrives in Syria?
10th February 2014
- Obama Promises 'Prudent Limits' on Drone Killings, Delivers Death by Unreliable Metadata
10th February 2014
- A Tale of Two Cities: Kiev and Washington
7th February 2014
- Targeted Killings and Obama's Secret Legal Memoranda
7th February 2014
- US 'Ukraine-gate' Threatens to Blow Up Into Major Conflagration
6th February 2014
- Why Are Syrian 'Moderates' Wearing Al-Qaeda and Taliban Clothing?
5th February 2014
- Rep. Walter Jones: More Spending on Afghanistan is 'Insanity'
5th February 2014
- Damage Done, McFaul Exits Russia
4th February 2014
- A Tale of Two Cities: Fallujah and Aleppo
3rd February 2014
- War Machine Again Gearing Up to Bomb Syria
3rd February 2014
- January
- Ron Paul Goes Off The Grid...With Jesse Ventura!
31st January 2014
- Ukraine in Revolt? Daniel McAdams Speaks With Tom Woods
30th January 2014
- Ron Paul: Rein In Obama or Suffer the Consequences
30th January 2014
- Geneva II, Iran, Syria, Ukraine: Daniel McAdams Talks with Jay Taylor
29th January 2014
- Hillary Clinton's Responsibility for Libya's Misery
25th January 2014
- Hillary's Hasty Rush to War on Syria
24th January 2014
- Ron Paul: Obama NSA Reform Speech Is "Nonsense," Public Can Defeat Politicians on Spying
24th January 2014
- Judge Napolitano: Obama's NSA Proposals Maintain Totalitarian Hallmarks
23rd January 2014
- The Economic 'Success' of US Interventionism
21st January 2014
- Iran, Syria and the Tragicomedy of U.S. Foreign Policy
21st January 2014
- How Dare They Invite Iran to The Syria Peace Conference!
20th January 2014
- Ron Paul: Congress' Failure to Check Executive Branch Would Astound Founders
19th January 2014
- Kerry's Geneva II Delusions
18th January 2014
- Ron Paul on the "Total Failure" of US Intervention in Iraq
15th January 2014
- War with Iran? New Sanctions? RPI's McAdams and Jay Taylor Discuss
15th January 2014
- Most Egyptians Oppose Messianic American Democratizers
14th January 2014
- New Post
13th January 2014
- Gates Too Kind About Biden?
13th January 2014
- It's An Al-Qaeda World
13th January 2014
- Has Robert Gates Become One of Us?
8th January 2014
- Back to Iraq? You Bet!
7th January 2014
- Rep. Walter Jones: Declassify 9/11 Report and End Afghanistan War
7th January 2014
- Ron Paul and Stephen Kinzer: The History of Interventionism
6th January 2014
- American Dictatorship, NSA Court Decision, and More: Daniel McAdams and Jay Taylor
3rd January 2014
- Dennis Kucinich for Ohio Governor?
2nd January 2014
- 2013
- December
- The Real 'Blame America' Crowd
31st December 2013
- Saudis to Buy French Weapons For Lebanon Army
30th December 2013
- McAdams' Year-End Chat With Jay Taylor
26th December 2013
- Judge Napolitano Applauds, Explains NSA Ruling
20th December 2013
- Judge Andrew Napolitano Explains Court Ruling on NSA, Describes Conspiracy Against US Constitution
19th December 2013
- Jay Taylor and RPI's Daniel McAdams: What in the World?
18th December 2013
- RPI's Daniel McAdams With Scott Horton
17th December 2013
- Ron Paul Discusses US Antiwar Sentiment And More With Alex Jones
14th December 2013
- RPI's McAdams and Tom Woods: Iran, Japan, Ukraine, and More...
14th December 2013
- RPI Board Members Denounce Mass Spying by Police on Cell Phone Users
10th December 2013
- Ron Paul: Freedom Is Not a Partisan Issue
8th December 2013
- US Spies: 'Nothing is Beyond Our Reach!"
6th December 2013
- Join the EU? Are You Crazy?
4th December 2013
- November
- Ukraine: Bullied and Blackmailed?
30th November 2013
- Eric Cantor Lies About the Iran Deal
25th November 2013
- Ukraine Rejects The Brussels Club, Opts For Trade Over Empty Promises
22nd November 2013
- Ron Paul Alumni Party on Jay Taylor Show!
20th November 2013
- 'Muddled Thinking' on Afghanistan
20th November 2013
- Wendy Sherman Should Be Fired
19th November 2013
- Nullify the NSA
19th November 2013
- Why Is It Now OK To Denounce Obama?
18th November 2013
- The Pro-Israel Lobby's Bubble Will Deflate
16th November 2013
- New Post
15th November 2013
- Whistle-blower Cop Describes Stop-and-Frisk, Corruption at NYPD
13th November 2013
- The Ron Paul Institute Meets The Ron Paul Channel!
12th November 2013
- Are Israel And The US Edging Closer To a Divorce?
11th November 2013
- What Happened to Iran Talks? Tom Woods Asks RPI's Daniel McAdams
11th November 2013
- Remember Armistice Day With Shane
11th November 2013
- I Would Not Carry a Gun for the Government
9th November 2013
- Is Syria Burning?
7th November 2013
- Widespread Hostility Toward TSA is Justified
6th November 2013
- City Voters Legalize Liquor Stores and Marijuana
6th November 2013
- Breaking: Obama's Syria Allies Bomb Vatican Embassy
6th November 2013
- Intel Chairman Hypes Terrorism Deaths
6th November 2013
- Machine Gun Cops And Drones, McAdams on Jay Taylor Show
6th November 2013
- Kerry Returns to Hold Saudi Hands
4th November 2013
- Israel Attacks Syria -- Again!
1st November 2013
- October
- Michael Scheuer Schools the House Homeland Security Committee
31st October 2013
- Intelligence Community Chiefs Push Back Against White House
30th October 2013
- Taming NSA? -- Daniel McAdams on RT Television's 'CrossTalk'
30th October 2013
- US/Saudi Relations -- Daniel McAdams on Jay Taylor's Show This Week
30th October 2013
- Ron Paul Discusses the Ron Paul Institute on the Tom Woods Show
30th October 2013
- The Great American Spy Caper
30th October 2013
- Does Anyone Believe Obama Did Not Know?
29th October 2013
- Religious Tolerance of McCain's Syrian Allies
28th October 2013
- Ron Paul's Push to End War on Pain Doctors -- Fresh Attacks!
26th October 2013
- Behind the Saudi Crack-Up
25th October 2013
- David 'Curveball' Albright Is Back With More 'Scary Iran Stories'
25th October 2013
- McCain Taken Down Over Support for Al-Qaeda
24th October 2013
- Syrian Chemical Weapons Facilities Under Rebel Control?
23rd October 2013
- Ambassador Michael Oren Worries About Growing US Non-Interventionism
22nd October 2013
- US Mass Spying Targets Mexico Presidents to Advance the Drug War
21st October 2013
- Introducing 'Background: A Deeper Look'
20th October 2013
- Be Afraid: New Homeland Security Chief OK'd Drone Strikes on Americans
18th October 2013
- This Week in the World With Daniel McAdams and Jay Taylor
16th October 2013
- October Ron Paul Freedom Report Out
15th October 2013
- Bravo Malala!
13th October 2013
- Cop in Tank: Freeze, Drop that Steak!
11th October 2013
- Why Only Pro-War Pundits Allowed in US Corporate Media? Ask WaPo
11th October 2013
- Lions of Liberty Roar With RPI's Daniel McAdams
10th October 2013
- NSA, Africa, Syria: Daniel McAdams and Jay Taylor on Top Stories of the Week
9th October 2013
- Ron Paul Channel Discusses US Africa Raids, Quotes RPI
9th October 2013
- Canada Joins US in the Hot Seat for Industrial Espionage
8th October 2013
- Covert US Action Brings Overt Failures in Africa
6th October 2013
- Unanticipated Benefit of US Government Shutdown
4th October 2013
- Judge Andrew Napolitano Explains the FISA Court Scam
4th October 2013
- Exposing the Prison Profiteers
3rd October 2013
- Govt. Shutdown, Ron Paul's Chevette, and More: McAdams with Taylor on Radio
2nd October 2013
- Afghan Attack: Who's to Blame, Marines or the Policy?
2nd October 2013
- September
- New Post
30th September 2013
- Is a Good News Story Emerging in the Middle East?
30th September 2013
- Guatemala President Otto Fernando Pérez Molina Praises Marijuana Legalization
29th September 2013
- UN Agreement Reached on Syria; Obama Warhawks Defeated on Every Count
26th September 2013
- Is TSA Frisking and Scanning Coming to the Local Mall?
26th September 2013
- Brazil President Dilma Rousseff Condemns US Mass Spying before UN General Assembly
25th September 2013
- LPAC, Kenya, Obama at the UN -- McAdams Talks Taylor
25th September 2013
- Ron Paul Institute's McAdams Talks Syria, Vladimir Putin and John McCain's Assessment of the Rebels
23rd September 2013
- Ron Paul Speech is LPAC Highlight
22nd September 2013
- RPI Advisor Kucinich Interviews Assad
18th September 2013
- McAdams Talks New Ron Paul Book, Syria With Jay Taylor
18th September 2013
- New Post
18th September 2013
- Arab Spring's Final Post Mortem
17th September 2013
- Meet Ron Paul in New York Tomorrow (9/17)!
17th September 2013
- De-Manufacturing Consent Interviews RPI's Daniel McAdams on Putin, Obama, and the Great Game
16th September 2013
- US and Russia Reach Agreement on Syria Weapons -- Can The US Stop Arming the Jihadists Now?
15th September 2013
- Ron Paul Stars at Fatima Peace Conference
14th September 2013
- US Attack on Syria Would Be Cash Cow for Military Contractors
13th September 2013
- The Real Elizabeth O'Bagy Scandal
12th September 2013
- US Customs and Border Protection Rolls Out Unconstitutional Searches Far from Borders
12th September 2013
- Is This Why Obama is So Desperate for a Nice Little War?
11th September 2013
- Obama's Defeat on Syrian Strike: The Downside
10th September 2013
- NH City Council Approves Acquiring Tank Despite Public Opposition
9th September 2013
- Mother Agnes Mariam: 'Footage of Syria Chemical Attack is a Fraud'
9th September 2013
- Should Administration's Syria Lies be Revealed to Us?
8th September 2013
- No Evidence? No Problem. Release Youtubes!
8th September 2013
- War Propagandists: The Curious Case of Elizabeth O'Bagy
8th September 2013
- Syria's Nayirah Moment: The Lies That Build the Case for War
7th September 2013
- New Post
5th September 2013
- Ron Paul on Mike Gallagher's Radio show 9/4
5th September 2013
- Obama's Syrian Allies Bombard Christian Village
5th September 2013
- Putin: Kerry Lies Beautifully
5th September 2013
- John Kerry Steals Wolfowitz's Iraq Lines for Syria War
5th September 2013
- Why No One Backs Washington's Push for Syria War
4th September 2013
- Ex-CIA Giraldi: Intel Colleagues Don't Buy Chemical Attack Story
4th September 2013
- Rep. Cantor Steals Condi Rice's Iraq Lines for Syria
3rd September 2013
- Who Gave Kerry The Syrian 'Smoking Gun'?
2nd September 2013
- August
- US to Launch Chemical Attack on Syria in Retaliation for Alleged Chemical Attack?
31st August 2013
- RPI Board Members Speak Out Against US Attack on Syria
30th August 2013
- Obama Taps the Clapper to Present Syria Intelligence Dossier
30th August 2013
- NYPD Muslim Surveillance and Mosque Infiltration Exposed
30th August 2013
- The Last Secular Arab Country
29th August 2013
- RPI's McAdams Talks Syria with VoiceAmerica's Jay Taylor
28th August 2013
- New Post
28th August 2013
- US Bombing Syrian Chemical Weapons Stockpiles Will Kill Many Thousands
27th August 2013
- 'Antiwar' Hagel: Pushing for War on Syria
27th August 2013
- Kerry's Syria Morality Tale Carries Scent of Hypocrisy and Mendacity
27th August 2013
- Ron Paul Talks Syria, Egypt on the Scott Horton Show
24th August 2013
- Humanitarian Wars and Their NGO Foot-Soldiers
23rd August 2013
- RPI Director on VoiceAmerica Radio
23rd August 2013
- For the Back to School List -- Military Recruiter Opt Out Form
17th August 2013
- John Whitehead and Lew Rockwell Discuss the Electronic Concentration Camp
15th August 2013
- Who Would Jesus Drone? RPI Director Speaks with Jay Taylor
15th August 2013
- New Post
15th August 2013
- Obama's Syrian Allies Destroy Another Christian Church
13th August 2013
- Hundreds Protest NH Police Chief's Tank Request
13th August 2013
- President's Spy Review Commission Provides Unintended Comedy
13th August 2013
- Embassy Closure Farce Ends Except in Yemen
13th August 2013
- Washington Gay Policy Push Counterproductive in Russia
12th August 2013
- Tom Woods and Pat Buchanan Dissect US Foreign Policy
9th August 2013
- NH Police Chief: I Need Tanks to Fight the Free State Project!
9th August 2013
- RPI Director Talks Iran with Jay Taylor on VoiceAmerica Radio
7th August 2013
- RPI's McAdams Talks McCain and Neocons With Scott Horton
7th August 2013
- US Intervention and Middle East 'Peace'
6th August 2013
- Leveretts: 'The Bankruptcy of Washington's Approach to Nuclear Diplomacy'
6th August 2013
- RPI's Daniel McAdams on Global Dispatch Radio interview yesterday
4th August 2013
- Major Terrorism Alert: Are They Crying 'Wolf'?
3rd August 2013
- Under New Spy Pressure, Administration Issues Al-Qaeda Threat Warning
2nd August 2013
- New Post
2nd August 2013
- Washington 'Geniuses' and Their Support for Syrian Rebels
1st August 2013
- RPI Director Interviewed on VoiceAmerica Radio
1st August 2013
- July
- James Comey Won't Improve the FBI
31st July 2013
- RPI Director Interviewed in RIA Novosti (Russia)
30th July 2013
- Greenwald Previews New Blockbuster NSA Story
29th July 2013
- The Rise of SWAT
25th July 2013
- DC Politics Commentators Express High Expectations for Ron Paul Channel
24th July 2013
- New Post
23rd July 2013
- Navalny Reporting Shows Western Media Clueless on Russia
22nd July 2013
- Who Needs Prison Time: Greenwald or Hayden?
20th July 2013
- Why is US Ambassador McFaul Sticking His Nose Into the Navalny Trial?
19th July 2013
- Goodbye, Janet
18th July 2013
- Obama's Second Term Foreign Policy: A Full Tank or Running on Empty?
15th July 2013
- A 'Salafi Shindig': Obama's Middle East Disaster
12th July 2013
- Reflections on the Egyptian Coup
6th July 2013
- Congress to Obama: Punish Iranians!
5th July 2013
- Roll Call Announces New National Security Blogger ... Boeing!
4th July 2013
- Father Francois Murad Beheaded By US-Allies in Syria
1st July 2013
- June
- Obama's Syrian Allies
27th June 2013
- New Post
26th June 2013
- What Can One Person Do Versus the Leviathan?
24th June 2013
- US Military to Egypt?
21st June 2013
- New Post
19th June 2013
- New Tourism Opportunities in Egypt
18th June 2013
- Who is Ben Rhodes?
17th June 2013
- Chemical Weapons 'Discovery" in Syria Opens Door for US Bombs
13th June 2013
- Are Internal Passports Next?
10th June 2013
- RPI Director on Traces of Reality Radio
9th June 2013
- New Post
9th June 2013
- Smoke Begins to Clear in Turkey
4th June 2013
- What if They Did it to Us?
2nd June 2013
- Who Likes the Ron Paul Institute?
1st June 2013
- May
- What Might Have Been...and What Is!
31st May 2013
- Orwell Reigns Over Raw Milk Trial
24th May 2013
- Senate Votes Unanimously Toward War Against Iran
22nd May 2013
- Another Lying Rice in the White House
16th May 2013
- RPI CEO Dr. Paul on the Drug War
10th May 2013
- RPI Advisor WIlkerson: Syria Evidence 'Pretty Flaky'
6th May 2013
- UN Commission Investigator: It Was The Syrian Rebels Who Used Sarin
6th May 2013
- More Israeli Bombs Over Syria
4th May 2013
- Syria's Drone Future
2nd May 2013
- RPI Chairman Interviewed on Institute
1st May 2013
- April
- New Today: Ron Paul on His New Peace Institute!
27th April 2013
- Tom Woods Exposes RPI Advisors' Real 'Faults'
24th April 2013
- 'Political groups in Washington downplayed Chechen threat'
23rd April 2013
- RPI Academic Board Member on Iran Sanctions
22nd April 2013
- Washington's Syria Policy in Free-Fall
17th April 2013
- Color Revolution for Venezuela?
16th April 2013
- Homeschooling: The Future of Liberty
15th April 2013
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Jan 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Trailer Trash , Jan 23 2020 18:30 utc | 44>This is the most critical U.S. election in our lifetime
> Posted by: Circe | Jan 23 2020 17:46 utc | 36Hmmm, I've been hearing the same siren song every four years for the past fifty. How is it that people still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?
Bureaucracies are reactionary and conservative by nature, so any new and more repressive policy Trumpy wants is readily adapted, as shown by the continuing barbarity of ICE and the growth of prisons and refugee concentration camps. Policies that go against the grain are easily shrugged off and ignored using time-tested passive-aggressive tactics.
One of Trump's insurmountable problems is that he has no loyal organization behind him whose members he can appoint throughout the massive Federal bureaucracy. Any Dummycrat whose name is not "Biden" has the same problem. Without a real mass-movement political party to pressure reluctant bureaucrats, no politician of any name or stripe will ever substantially change the direction of US policy.
But the last thing Dummycrats want is a real mass movement, because they might not be able to control it. Instead Uncle Sam will keep heading towards the cliff, which may be coming into view...
Per/Norway , Jan 23 2020 19:31 utc | 62
The amount of TINA worshipers and status quo guerillas is starting to depress me.Piotr Berman , Jan 23 2020 20:19 utc | 82
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to believe A politician will/can change anything and give your consent to war criminals and traitors?
NO person(s) WILL EVER get to the top in imperial/vassal state politics without being on the rentier class side, the cognitive dissonans in voting for known liars, war criminals and traitors would kill me or fry my brain. TINA is a lie and "she" is a real bitch that deserves to be thrown on the dump off history, YOUR vote is YOUR consent to murder, theft and treason.
DONT be a rentier class enabler STOP voting and start making your local communities better and independent instead.Per
NorwayThe amount of TINA worshipers and status quo guerillas is starting to depress me. <- NorwayOf course, There Is Another Way, for example, kvetching. We can boldly show that we are upset, and pessimistic. One upset pessimists reach critical mass we will think about some actions.
But being upset and pessimistic does fully justify inactivity. In particular, given the nature of social interaction networks, with spokes and hubs, dominating the network requires the control of relatively few nodes. The nature of democracy always allows for leverage takeover, starting from dominating within small to the entire nation in few steps. As it was nicely explained by Prof. Overton, there is a window of positions that the vast majority regards as reasonable, non-radical etc. One reason that powers to be invest so much energy vilifying dissenters, Russian assets of late, is to keep them outside the Overton window.
Having a candidate elected that the curators of Overton window hate definitely shakes the situation with the potential of shifting the window. There were some positive symptoms after Trump was elected, but negatives prevail. "Why not we just kill him" idea entered the window, together with "we took their oil because we have guts and common sense".
From that point of view, visibility of Tulsi and election of Sanders will solve some problems but most of all, it will make big changes in Overton window.
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Jan 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Trailer Trash , Jan 23 2020 18:30 utc | 44For example, Trump managed to speed up the process od destruction of the USA-centered neoliberal empire considerably. Especially by lauching the trade war with China. He also managed to discredit the USA foreign policy as no other president before him. Even Bush II.
>This is the most critical U.S. election in our lifetime
> Posted by: Circe | Jan 23 2020 17:46 utc | 36Hmmm, I've been hearing the same siren song every four years for the past fifty. How is it that people still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?
Bureaucracies are reactionary and conservative by nature, so any new and more repressive policy Trumpy wants is readily adapted, as shown by the continuing barbarity of ICE and the growth of prisons and refugee concentration camps. Policies that go against the grain are easily shrugged off and ignored using time-tested passive-aggressive tactics.
One of Trump's insurmountable problems is that he has no loyal organization behind him whose members he can appoint throughout the massive Federal bureaucracy. Any Dummycrat whose name is not "Biden" has the same problem. Without a real mass-movement political party to pressure reluctant bureaucrats, no politician of any name or stripe will ever substantially change the direction of US policy.
But the last thing Dummycrats want is a real mass movement, because they might not be able to control it. Instead Uncle Sam will keep heading towards the cliff, which may be coming into view...
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Jan 23, 2020 | americantruthtoday.com
This, however, is an outright lie. If Democrats truly valued America over their own partisan interests, they wouldn't have forced a hoax impeachment through government, despite the overwhelming opposition against it. Moreover, if "country over party" mattered to Democrats, then they wouldn't have commenced talks about impeachment since before the inception of Trump's presidency.
A new year and new decade may be upon us, but this doesn't mean that Democrats are any less terrified of seeing their impeachment sham die in the Senate.
As a matter of fact, 2020 Democrat and Sen. Elizabeth Warren spent New Year's Eve raging against her Republican colleagues and making baseless accusations against Trump, per reports from Washington Examiner.
Reviewing Warren's Tirade Against Senate Republicans The 2020 socialist's remarks about Republican members of the Senate came during her New Year's Eve address in Boston, Massachusetts. Warren lamented over the reality that Democrats will not be able to bully or intimidate Republicans into voting for a partisan-driven, unfounded sham. This blows Warren's far-left, unwell mind, so she opted to blast GOP senators as " fawning, spineless defenders" of President Trump's supposed "crimes."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks in Boston: "[President Trump] has tried to squeeze foreign governments to advance his own political fortunes. Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress have turned into fawning spineless defenders of his crimes." pic.twitter.com/sGyLqsA8C7
-- The Hill (@thehill) January 1, 2020Shortly thereafter, Warren followed up with the lie that ramming the weakest and thinnest impeachment through government "brought no joy" to House Democrats. This, of course, just isn't accurate; House Rep. Rashida Tlaib posted a gleeful livestream prior to the "impeachment" where she bragged about being "on [her] way to the United States House floor" in order to "impeach President Trump."
Finally, Warren declared that conservative senators need to "choose truth over politics" or else President Trump will attempt to "cheat his way" via the 2020 election.
Misplaced Outrage As per usual with Democrats, the outrage is misplaced and misguided. If Warren is so eager for a trial, then she should be directed this animosity towards House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who continues to hoard the impeachment articles.
f left-wing Congress members truly believed they had a solid case against the president, they'd be more than eager for the Senate to receive the articles and begin conducting a trial; instead, however, raging at President Trump and Senate Republicans is easier than acknowledge the true reality here.
Democrats forced the weakest, thinnest, and fastest impeachment through the House. The president did absolutely nothing wrong and will be acquitted either when the Senate holds a trial or by default if Pelosi keeps hoarding the articles.
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Jan 01, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org
© Photo: Wikipedia In order to understand the great impeachment charade, it's important to keep three facts about the strange bird known as the United States uppermost in mind.The first is that the U.S. is the ultimate law-based society, one whose structure derives entirely from a single four-thousand-word document created in 1787. The second is that while Americans think of the Constitution as the greatest plan of government known to man, it's actually the opposite: a grotesque pre-modern relic that grows more unrepresentative and unresponsive with each passing year. A pro-rural Electoral College that has overridden the popular vote in two of the last five presidential elections; a lopsided Senate that allows the majority in ten urban states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty; lifetime Supreme Court justices who can veto any law at variance with an ancient constitution that only they understand – it's a broken-down old rattletrap in need of a top-to-bottom overhaul. Yet it's so thoroughly frozen that structural reform is all but unthinkable.
The third thing to keep in mind is that as the constitutional system grows more and more undemocratic, the two-party system that grew out of it in the nineteenth century grows more undemocratic as well. The result is a bipartisan race to the right. Sometimes, the Republicans seem to be in the lead as Trump imprisons thousands of immigrants fleeing murderous conditions in Central America that the U.S. war on drugs helped create. Other times it's the Democrats as they beat the drums for imperialist war against Russia.
Take all these factors – xenophobia, mindless obeisance to ancient law, a president imposed against the popular will, etc. – mix thoroughly, place in a super-hot oven due to a growing imperial crisis, and impeachment is what pops out. The process itself is very old, a by-product of fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman law. (Impeachment derives from the Old French empeechier, meaning to ensnare or entrap.) The British abandoned it in the late eighteenth century when Edmund Burke wasted seven years impeaching an Indian colonial governor named Warren Hastings on grounds of corruption. (The House of Lords finally acquitted him in 1795). But then the Americans took it up and now, two centuries later, are immersed in the same brainless exercise.
The results were all too evident in mid-December when one Democrat after another took to the House floor to denounced Donald Trump for violating the ancient constitution by withholding lethal military aid from the neo-Nazis of the Ukraine's Azov Battalion.
"We used to stand up to Putin and Russia – I know the party of Ronald Reagan used to," declared Adam Schiff, the Democratic point man on impeachment, his voice quivering with emotion. The fight to defend the Ukraine is "about more than Ukraine. It's about us. It's about our national security. Their fight is our fight. Their defense is our defense . And when the President sacrifices our interests, our national security for his election, he is sacrificing our country for his personal gain."
This was the Democratic line in a nutshell. In order to safeguard the ancient republic at home, the U.S. must pay foreign satraps to defend its imperial interests abroad. Since no patriotic American could possibly disagree, any and all problems must stem from meddling by the evil dictator Vladimir Putin and his traitorous puppet in the Oval Office. Americans must therefore fulfill the ancient law by impeaching him just as the "founding fathers" would have wanted. Only then will peace and freedom return to the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It's all quite ridiculous, but what's even more bonkers is that millions of Americans think it's true. Trump is meanwhile in his element. Now that Democrats have voted to impeach him in the House, he'd like nothing more than a lengthy trial in the Senate because (a) acquittal in the upper house is a certainty and (b) it will allow the Republican majority to put the torturers to the rack by subpoenaing everyone from Joe and Hunter Biden to Adam Schiff himself and declaring them in contempt of Congress if they refuse to testify. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has described an all-out Senate war as "mutual assured destruction," and he's right since, once unleashed, the ancient constitutional machinery will grind everything to dust in its path.
American politics will grow only more farcical. If Putin looms larger and larger on the world stage; if "the moment has come," as the Times Literary Supplement recently announced , "for even the most hardened skeptics to admit that he is one of the most successful world leaders of our era"; if the U.S. at the same time staggers from one imperial disaster to another even while descending into civil war – then it's not because the Russian leader is particularly clever, but because the U.S. is locked in an ancient mindset that is increasingly divorced from reality. It's lost in a constitutional labyrinth of its own making, and impeachment is leading it deeper and deeper into the maze.
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Apr 20, 2019 | www.nbcnews.com
On impeachment, Warren just stole the show from her dodging Democratic rivals By Jonathan Allen
Analysis: The Massachusetts senator's forceful call to begin the process of removing Trump set her apart from the crowded primary field.
While most fellow 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls ducked and dived to find safe ground -- and party elders solemnly warned against over-reach -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren stepped boldly out into the open late Friday and called on the House to begin an impeachment process against President Donald Trump based on special counsel Robert Mueller's report.
The Massachusetts senator and 2020 Democratic presidential contender slammed Trump for having "welcomed" the help of a "hostile" foreign government and having obstructed the probe into an attack on an American election.
"To ignore a President's repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country," Warren tweeted. "The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States."
It was a rare moment in a crowded and unsettled primary: A seized opportunity for a candidate to cut through the campaign trail cacophony and define the terms of a debate that will rage throughout the contest.
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Jan 22, 2020 | www.wsws.org
CNN and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, with powerful establishment support, combined to stage a provocation this week aimed at slowing down or derailing the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Through CNN, the Massachusetts senator's camp first alleged that Sanders told her in December 2018 a woman could not win a presidential election, an allegation Sanders strenuously refuted. At the Democratic debate on Tuesday night, CNN's moderator acted as though the claim was an indisputable reality, leading to a post-debate encounter between Warren and Sanders, which the network just happened to record and circulate widely.
This is a political stink bomb, borrowed from the #MeToo playbook, typical of American politics in its putrefaction. Unsubstantiated allegations are turned into "facts," these "facts" become the basis for blackening reputations and damaging careers and shifting politics continuously to the right. Anyone who denies the allegations is a "sexist" who refuses "to believe women."
The Democratic establishment is fearful of Sanders, not so much for his nationalist-reformist program and populist demagogy, but for what his confused but growing support portends: the movement to the left by wide layers of the American population. The US ruling elite seems convinced, like some wretched, self-deluded potentate of old, that if it can simply stamp out the unpleasant "noise," the rising tide of disaffection will dissipate.
CNN's operation began Monday when it posted a "bombshell" article by M.J. Lee with the headline, "Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren in private 2018 meeting that a woman can't win, sources say."
The article animatedly begins, "The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren's apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018." Among other things, the CNN piece reported, the pair "discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win."
Lee continues, "The description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting." In reality, the story is based on the account of one individual with a considerable interest in cutting into Sanders' support, i.e., Elizabeth Warren. As the New York Times primly noted, "Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders were the only people in the room."
The absurd CNN article goes on, "After publication of this story, Warren herself backed up this account of the meeting, saying in part in a statement Monday, 'I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.'" In other words, Warren "backed up" what could only have been her own account insofar as she was the only person there besides Sanders!
After a pro forma insertion of Sanders' categorical denial that he ever made such a statement, in which he reasonably observed, "Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016," Lee plowed right ahead as though his comments were not worth responding to. She carries on, "The conversation also illustrates the skepticism among not only American voters but also senior Democratic officials that the country is ready to elect a woman as president" and, further, "The revelation that Sanders expressed skepticism that Warren could win the presidency because she is a woman is particularly noteworthy now, given that Warren is the lone female candidate at the top of the Democratic field."
This is one of the ways in which the sexual misconduct witch-hunt has poisoned American politics, although by no means the only one. Warren's claims about a private encounter simply "must be believed."
During the Democratic candidates' debate itself Tuesday night, moderator Abby Phillips addressed Sanders in the following manner: "Let's now turn to an issue that's come up in the last 48 hours [because Warren and CNN generated it]. Sen. Sanders, CNN reported yesterday that -- and Sen. Sanders, Sen. Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that? " (emphasis added). Sanders denied once again that he had said any such thing. Phillips persisted, "Sen. Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you're saying that you never told Sen. Warren that a woman could not win the election?" Sanders confirmed that. Insultingly, Phillips immediately turned to Warren and continued, "Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?" This was all clearly prepared ahead of time, a deliberate effort to embarrass Sanders and portray him as a liar and a male chauvinist.
Following the debate, Warren had the audacity to confront the Vermont senator, refuse to shake his hand and assert, "I think you called me a liar on national TV." When Sanders seemed startled by her remark, she repeated it. CNN managed to capture the sound and preserve it for widespread distribution.
The WSWS gives no support to Sanders, a phony "socialist" whose efforts are aimed at channeling working-class anger at social inequality, poverty and war back into the big business Democratic Party. He is only the latest in a long line of figures in American political history devoted to maintaining the Democrats' stranglehold over popular opposition and blocking the development of a broad-based socialist movement.
Nonetheless, the CNN-Warren "dirty tricks" operation is an obvious hatchet job and an attack from the right. Accordingly, the New York Times and other major outlets have been gloating and attempting to make something out of it since Tuesday night. The obvious purpose is to "raise serious questions" about Sanders and dampen support for him, among women especially. It should be recalled that in 2016 Sanders led Hillary Clinton among young women by 30 percentage points.
Michelle Cottle, a member of the Times editorial board (in "Why Questions on Women Candidates Strike a Nerve," January 15), asserted that the issue raised by the Warren-Sanders clash was "not about Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. Not really. And Ms. Warren was right to try to shift the focus to the bigger picture -- even if some critics will sneer that she's playing 'the gender card.'"
Cottle's "bigger picture," it turned out, primarily involved smearing Sanders. The present controversy, she went on, "has resurfaced some of Mr. Sanders's past women troubles. His 2016 campaign faced multiple accusations of sexual harassment, pay inequities and other gender-based mistreatment. Asked early last year if he knew about the complaints, Mr. Sanders's reaction was both defensive and dismissive: 'I was a little bit busy running around the country'."
After Cottle attempted to convince her readers, on the basis of dubious numbers, that Americans were perhaps too backward to elect a female president, she continued, again, taking as good coin Warren's allegations, "This less-than-inspiring data -- along with from-the-trail anecdotes about the gender-based voter anxiety that Ms. Warren and Ms. [Amy] Klobuchar have been facing -- help explain why Mr. Sanders's alleged remarks struck such a nerve. Women candidates and their supporters aren't simply outraged that he could be so wrong. They're worried that he might be right." The remarks he denies making have nonetheless "outraged" Cottle and others.
The Times more and more openly expresses fears about a possible Sanders' nomination. Op-ed columnist David Leonhardt headlined his January 14 piece, "President Bernie Sanders," and commented, "Sanders has a real shot of winning the Democratic nomination. Only a couple of months after he suffered a mild heart attack, that counts as a surprise." Leonhardt downplays Sanders' socialist credentials, observing that "while he [Sanders] would probably fail to accomplish his grandest goals (again, like Medicare for all), he would also move the country in a positive direction. He might even move it to closer to a center-left ideal than a more moderate candidate like Biden would."
On Thursday, right-wing Times columnist David Brooks argued pathetically against the existence of "class war" in "The Bernie Sanders Fallacy." He ridiculed what he described as "Bernie Sanders's class-war Theyism: The billionaires have rigged the economy to benefit themselves and impoverish everyone else." According to Brooks, Sanders is a Bolshevik who believes that "Capitalism is a system of exploitation in which capitalist power completely dominates worker power." Accusing Sanders of embracing such an ABC socialist proposition is all nonsense, but it reveals something about what keeps pundits like Brooks up at night.
The Times is determined, as the WSWS has noted more than once, to exclude anything from the 2020 election campaign that might arouse or encourage the outrage of workers and young people. The past year of global mass protest has only deepened and strengthened that determination.
The Times , CNN and other elements of the media and political establishment, and behind them powerful financial-corporate interests, don't want Sanders and they don't necessarily want Warren either, who engaged in certain loose talk about taxing the billionaires, before retreating in fright. They want a campaign dominated by race, gender and sexual orientation -- not class and not social inequality. The #MeToo-style attack on Sanders reflects both the "style" and the right-wing concerns of these social layers.
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Jeff W , January 21, 2020 at 1:41 am
" if she does anything less than help elect the last and only progressive with a chance, she damages them both to Biden's benefit "
If Elizabeth Warren's candidacy becomes unviable, the pressure on her to combine her delegates with those of Sanders -- from those supporting Bernie Sanders and those legitimately concerned with Joe Biden's chances against Trump* -- will be enormous . And, if , instead, Warren helps nominate Biden and Biden then goes on to lose to Donald Trump -- as I'm all but certain he will -- it will be all too clear just who played a pivotal role in helping to make that match-up even possible.
I have no confidence in Elizabeth Warren "doing the right thing"; she might be susceptible to the pressure and to the ignominy attached to doing the disastrously wrong thing.
*Donald Trump, for his part, is reportedly " privately obsessed " with Sanders, not, it seems, with Biden.
rusti , January 21, 2020 at 2:07 am
In Sanders' case, his surge in the polls coincided with his emergence as the chief apologist for the Iranian regime. We needed to point out that he would be dangerous as president since he made clear he would appease terrorists and terror-sponsoring nations.
If this is really representative of a line of attack that the Trump campaign plans to use on him, that would be great. I can't imagine anything that would resonate less with voters. But I was a bit surprised to see this in a Bernie fundraising mail:
The wise course would have been to stick with that nuclear agreement, enforce its provisions, and use that diplomatic channel with Iran to address our other concerns with Iran, including their support of terrorism.
What groups are they referring to when they say this? Hezbollah, which is part of Parliament in Lebanon? Iraqi PMF that are loosely integrated with the Iraqi army?
Bill Carson , January 21, 2020 at 2:15 am
Yep, Warren is a political novice, and she's extremely naive. That Massachusetts senate seat was practically handed to her on a silver platter. She has no idea that she was played in '16 and she's being played now.
Arizona Slim , January 21, 2020 at 8:22 am
From a recent episode of the Jimmy Dore Show, it's the cringe-worthy Warren "Selfie" Gimmick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5JWIiVMj6g If this doesn't scream "political novice," I don't know what will.
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Massinissa , January 21, 2020 at 12:49 pm
"Willingness to compromise" = willingness to give obeisance to most of exploitative corporate capitalism.
Amit Chokshi , January 21, 2020 at 5:52 am
Warren has a track record of lying: lied about her dad being a janitor, hers kids going to public school, getting fired for being pregnant, and obviously the Native American heritage.
As pointed here on NC she's great at grandstanding when bank CEOs are in front of her and doing nothing following that.
My gut is she is going to endorse Joe Biden and prob got a tease of VP or some other role and all she had to do was kamikaze into Bernie with this. It's backfiring but at this rate and given she's too deep into it now when she drops out she'll prob back Biden as she hasn't shown the integrity to back a guy like Berni.
Yves Smith Post author , January 21, 2020 at 5:57 am
I don't see how she is anyone's VP. She is too old. You want someone under 60, better 50, particularly for an old presidential candidate. Treasury Secretary is a more powerful position. The big appeal of being VP is maybe it positions you later to be President but that last worked out for Bush the Senior.
Arizona Slim , January 21, 2020 at 8:24 am
And Bush the Senior lost his re-election bid.
pebird , January 21, 2020 at 9:41 am
Because he asked us to read his lips. And he didn't think we were lip readers.
Oh , January 21, 2020 at 10:57 am
She may be looking to be the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture. /s
Sue E Greenwald , January 21, 2020 at 8:19 am
She's toxic now. No one will want her has VP. Sanders supporters despise her, she comes from a small, Democratic state and she's loaded with baggage. She brings nothing to a ticket. She torpedoed any hopes or plans she might have had in that regard.
jackiebass , January 21, 2020 at 6:40 am
I've watched Bernie for years. Even long before he decided to run for president. He is the same today as he was then. Bernie isn't afraid to advocate for something , even though he will get a lot of backlash. I also believe he is sincere in his convictions. If he says something he believes in it.Something you can't say for the other candidates. Bernie is by far my first choice.
After that it would be Warren. Bernie is labeled as a socialist. Actually he is a real Roosevelt democrat. As a life long democrat, I can't support or vote for a Wall Street candidate. Unlike one of the other commenters, I will never vote for Trump but instead wold vote for a third party candidate. Unfortunate the DNC will do anything to prevent Bernie from being candidate. Progressive democrats need to get out and support a progressive or the nomination will again be stolen by a what I call a light republican.
Robert Hahl , January 21, 2020 at 7:26 am
What is great about Bernie is that he is so sure-footed. It was visible in the hot-mic trap Warren set for him where she got nothing, it actually hurt her.
Anonymous Coward , January 21, 2020 at 3:05 pm
The most impressive thing I have witnessed about Bernie is that he can extemporaneously recall and explain exactly why he voted as he did on every piece of legislation that he has cast a vote on. in. his. life. It is a remarkable talent.
Howard , January 21, 2020 at 6:48 am
The outcome of the upcoming Iowa Caucus is too hard to predict. All the candidates are very close. Sanders needs to turnout young and working class voters to win. By many reports, Warren has an excellent ground game in IA and The NY Times endorsement has given a path for her to pick up Klobuchar voters after round one of the caucus.
Biden is a mystery to me. How the heck is he even running. Obama pleaded with him not to. That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if he finishes in the top two. Buttigieg is the wild card. I think the "electability" argument will hurt him as he can't win after NH.
ALM , January 21, 2020 at 7:51 am
According to a recent poll, Elizabeth Warren is one of the most unpopular senators with voters in her own state as measured against approval rates of all other senators in their states. I find this very surprising for someone with a national profile. What do voters in Massachusetts not like about her?
As for me, I find it more and more difficult to trust Warren because she takes the bait and yields to pressure during a primary when the pressure to back down, moderate, and abandon once championed policy positions and principles is a great deal less than it is during the general election. Warren has gone from Medicare4All to a public option to, in the recent debate, tweaks to the ACA. Despite her roll-out of an ambitious $10 trillion Green New Deal plan, Warren is now to the right of Chuck "Wall Street" Schumer as evidenced by her support of NAFTA 2.0 which utterly fails to address climate change. WTF! Where will she be during a general election?
And her political instincts are awful as recently demonstrated by her woke, badly executed girl power attack against a candidate who has been a committed feminist for his entire political career.
Another Scott , January 21, 2020 at 9:18 am
She also has horrible constituent service. I had an issue with a federal student loan a few years ago (I believe it was the servicer depositing money but not crediting my account and charging me interest and late fees). After getting nowhere with the company, I tried calling her office, figuring that as this was one of her core issues, I would get some response, either help or at least someone who would want to record what happened to her actual constituent. I didn't hear back for about a month, by which time I had resolved the issue – no fees or additional interest through multiple phone calls and emails.
In other words, Elizabeth Warren's constituent service is worse than Sallie Mae's.
T , January 21, 2020 at 9:31 am
The stupid Ponds cold cream lie is the worst. Unless she teed up the "how do you look so young!" question , the corrected answer is to point out the nonsense of talking about a candidates looks and addressing actual sexism.
Instead she has a goofball answer about only using Ponds cold cream which lead to Derm pointing out her alleged method was not good advice and also pointing out that she appears to have used botex and fillers, which I don't think people were talking about before then, in public.
The most generous explanation is she was caught flat-footed and, once again, showed she has terrible instincts.
Just a dumb dumb move.
Stefan , January 21, 2020 at 8:43 am
If Bernie Sanders can get it through the thick noggin of the nation that he stands for and will implement the principles, policies, and values of the New Deal–the attitude that got us through the Great Depression and Wotld War II–he has every chance of being elected the next President of the United States.
Stefan , January 21, 2020 at 8:47 am
Btw, is Inauguration Day just a year away?
The Rev Kev , January 21, 2020 at 9:02 am
Google says Wednesday Jan 20, 2021: Swearing-In Ceremony. And here is a countdown page-
https://days.to/when-is/us-presidential-inauguration/2021
Trust me. By the time it comes around you won't care who gets sworn in as you will just be glad that all the vicious, wretched skullduggery of this year's elections will finally be over.
Pat , January 21, 2020 at 11:11 am
And hoping you get one day of rest before the vicious, wretched skullduggery of undermining the desires of the American people gets started. Obviously Sanders will make the Trump years look a cake walk. Anyone else (Democrat or Trump) we will see lots of 'working for' and 'resistance' type memes while largely doing nothing of the sort, but a whole lot of 'bipartisan' passage of terrible things.
Samuel Conner , January 21, 2020 at 10:25 am
It sounds like Sanders, in the famous 2018 conversation, may have been trying to politely encourage EW to not run in 2020. Her moment was 2016 and she declined to run then when a Progressive candidate was needed. Her run in 2020 to some extent divides the Progressive vote. EW interpreted, perhaps intentionally, Sanders' words to imply that he thinks "no woman can win in 2020", and then weaponized them against him.
The very fact that she is running at all suggests to me that she is not at heart a Progressive and in fact does not want a Progressive candidate to win. If she had run in 2016, Sanders would not have run in order to not divide the Progressive vote. EW knew that Sanders would run in 2020 and planned to run anyway. It is hard for me to not interpret this to be an intentional bid for some of the Progressive vote, in order to hold Sanders down.
Anon , January 21, 2020 at 11:59 am
I agree. She decides to do things based on her own self-interest, and uses progressives as pawns to work her way up in DC. My guess is that Warren chickened out in 2016 and didn't run because maybe she didn't think she had a chance against the Clintons. When Warren saw how well Sanders did against Clinton, how close he was at winning, I think only then she decided that 2020 was a good chance for a progressive, or someone running as a progressive candidate, to win the nomination.
She saw how Sanders had fired up loyal progressive support in the Democratic Party. She chickened out back then when she could have endorsed Bernie in '16, but chose not to, probably hoping not to burn bridges with Clinton in order to get a plum role in her administration. Her non-endorsement in '16 worries me because it shows once again that Warren makes decisions largely based on what is good for her career, not what she thinks is better for the country (if she really is the progressive she claims to be).
Knowing that there was now a strong progressive base ready to vote for a candidate left of Democratic candidates like Biden and Clinton, Warren saw her entry into having a good chance at winning the presidency. Rather than thinking about the implications for Bernie and the possibility of dividing left-wing voters, her desire to become president was more important. Remember, this is exactly what Bernie did not do in 2016 when he urged Warren to run, and was willing to step aside, if she had agreed to do so.
If I had been in Sanders position, I probably would have sat down and talked to Warren about the serious implications of the both of them running in 2020. How he had hoped to build on the momentum from his last campaign and the sexism that was used against Clinton in 2016. Hey, if I had been Sanders, I probably would have told Warren not to run. Not because she's a woman, but because it would have been obvious to Bernie that with Warren running alongside him, they would both end up splitting the progressive vote.
What is happening now between the two of them should have been no surprise to either Bernie or Warren. They are both popular among Democrats who identify as progressive or left-of-center. Democrats will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. And I agree that when it becomes evident that one of them cannot win, either Bernie or Warren must step aside for the good of the country and fully back the other. There is no other option if either of them truly wants the other to win the nomination rather than Biden. I'm hoping that Warren will do so since it is becoming more clear that Sanders is the stronger progressive and the stronger candidate who has a better chance at beating both Biden and Trump.
Lambert Strether , January 21, 2020 at 3:37 pm
> "no woman can win in 2020"
The claim was "no woman can win." It was not qualified in any way.
landline , January 21, 2020 at 10:34 am
If sheepdog St. Bernard Sanders begins to look like the presumptive nominee, look for a new candidate to throw her hat into the ring. Her name: Michelle Obama.
Lambert Strether , January 21, 2020 at 3:42 pm
> sheepdog St. Bernard Sanders
I'm so sick of that sheepdog meme (originated by, much as a respect BAR, by a GP activist bitter, I would say, over many years of GP ineffectuality). The elites seem to be pretty nervous about a sheepdog.
pretzelattack , January 21, 2020 at 3:52 pm
if he were a sheepdog, why would the shepherds have to intervene? they wouldn't.
Lee , January 21, 2020 at 10:51 am
And now we have Sanders apologizing for an op-ed in the Guardian by Zephyr Teachout accusing Biden of corruption.
The op-ed simply says what Sanders has said all along, the system is corrupted by big donors. Then she explicitly states the obvious, which Sanders won't at this point say but that Trump certainly will: Biden is a prime example of serving his donors' interests to the detriment of most of the rest of us. Sanders subsequently apologizes for Teachout's baldly true assertion, stating that he doesn't believe that Biden is corrupt.
I guess we're meant to draw a clear distinction between legalized and illegal corruption. I don't know. They both look like ducks to me.
Oh , January 21, 2020 at 11:05 am
Sometimes it's better for Bernie to keep his mouth shut.
Samuel Conner , January 21, 2020 at 11:07 am
I have read that Sanders is the #2 choice of many Iowans who favor JB; it makes a lot of sense for him to not "go negative" on JB in the run-up to the caucuses.
There will be time for plainer speaking. Sanders has been clear about his views on the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics. JB is exhibit #1 within the D primary field and there will be plenty of opportunity to note that.
I suspect that there is a great deal of "method" in what may look to us like "madness" in the Senator's civility.
Samuel Conner , January 21, 2020 at 11:18 am
To put it another way, I doubt very much that Sanders believes that JB's legislative agendas were not significantly influenced by the sources of his campaign funds. And I'm sure that attention will be drawn to this at the right time.
One can charitably affirm that one believes that JB is not a consciously corrupt , pay-for-play, kind of person, while also affirming that of course he has been influenced by the powerful interests that have funded his career, and that this has not served the interests of the American people. All in due course.
jrs , January 21, 2020 at 12:37 pm
The thing is Warren would make the right argument here: that it's the system that is corrupted, and make it well. Too bad she has shown so completely that can't be trusted as a person, because she often looks good on paper
inode_buddha , January 21, 2020 at 1:37 pm
I think Warren misses the key point that the reason why the system is corrupted is because the players in it are corrupted. They can be bought and sold. That is why they have no shame.
Lambert Strether , January 21, 2020 at 3:43 pm
> The thing is Warren would make the right argument here: that it's the system that is corrupted
That's not the right answer at all. The climate crisis, for example, is not caused by a lack of transparency in the oil industry. It is caused by capital allocation decisions by the billionaire class and their servicers in subaltern classes.
urblintz , January 21, 2020 at 11:12 am
"The real game changer around here, though, might be Iowa State University's decision, after years of pressure, to issue new student IDs, enabling 35,000 students to vote, even under Iowa's restrictive new voter-ID law. That's a progressive victory, and in a different media universe, it would be a story even juicier than a handshake." Iowa is not the Twittersphere – Laura Flanders
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/21/iowa-is-not-the-twitterverse/
ptb , January 21, 2020 at 11:23 am
Thanks for giving this the attention it needs, analysis of the primary has been too light on estimation of delegate numbers and strategy.
Prior to Warren's apparent turn to some new direction, the setup for a 3way DNC with a progressive "coalition" was not only conceivable, but actually expected from the polls.
We are on pace for Sanders+Warren's combined delegate total to exceed Biden by a healthy amount (say 4:3) with all others falling below 15% state by state and getting few or no delegates. Obviously subject to snowballing in either direction, but that's the polls now and for most of the past year.
Warren's attack on Sanders, and NYT endorsement, say the national party doesn't expect any such coalition. Therefore Warren has made her choice. That's that.
The path to winning the Dem primary is a little narrower for Sanders, and also for Biden, since he seems to lack the confidence of his the top strata. The DNC screws a lot up but they know how to read polls. I'm pretty sure that running Warren in the General is not their plan A.
Voters in Iowa and the early states (incl. TX and CA) look like they will be deciding it all this year. The tremendous enthusiasm of Sanders followers gives him, IMO, the best ground game of the three. Will be an interesting 6 weeks.
jrs , January 21, 2020 at 12:40 pm
Running Warren in the general might be their plan A. They may not want to win. Of course they might rather have Klobuchar but
Hepativore , January 21, 2020 at 12:52 pm
I do not even trust Warren to hand any delegates she gets to Sanders at this point. Because her campaign staff is so full of Clintonites and neoliberals, she might give them to Biden instead.
She seems to have gone full establishment at this point.
Lambert Strether , January 21, 2020 at 3:39 pm
> I do not even trust Warren to hand any delegates she gets to Sanders at this point. Because her campaign staff is so full of Clintonites and neoliberals, she might give them to Biden instead.
Correct.
ambrit , January 21, 2020 at 1:10 pm
The youngish rehab therapist, a woman, said this morning that of the women running, she likes Klobuchar. "If only her voice wasn't so screechy. And I'm saying this as a woman." She was seriously disturbed by Clinton's attack on Sanders.
Several neighbors are leaning towards Yang.John k , January 21, 2020 at 1:14 pm
The value of her endorsement
My impression is her supporters are mostly older, mostly female, and mostly centrist. Many want to elect a female pres before they die. Prior to the she said event her supporters second choice were split fairly evenly between Bernie and Biden but the latest fracas is driving her most progressive supporters to Bernie.
This means most of those remaining will probably migrate to Biden if when she drops out even if she recommends Bernie. (If 1/3 of her supporters that had Bernie as their second choice switch to Bernie, then 60% of her remaining supporters have Biden as their second choice.)
2016 was different, Clinton already had the older females. But there was a period where just a little support might have tipped the scale in what was a very tight race.
Anyway, I see going forward she will be mostly holding supporters whose second choice is Biden even as she maybe doesn't reach the 15% barrier
and same with Amy. So I hope they both stay in at least until super tue.And While I previously thought she was a reasonable choice for veep, I now realize she'd be an awful choice. Maybe treasury if she does endorse which she will do if Bernie looks a winner.
worldblee , January 21, 2020 at 1:35 pm
How can anyone be surprised at the lack of trustworthiness from a politician who chose to endorse Clinton in 2016 rather than Bernie? Warren has been playing the DNC game for a long time now, which ideologically is in line with her lifelong Republican stance before changing to the more demographically favorable party when she was 47. She's not progressive now, and never has been or will be.
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Both campaigns are backing away from greater public conflict. Whether that holds true in the long run is anyone's guess, but my guess is that it will. Still, the following is clear:
- Warren has been damaged, perhaps permanently, in the eyes of many Sanders supporters who have considered her a good, and perhaps equivalent, second choice. Her favorability has gone way down in their eyes and may never recover.
- Warren's charge of sexism has inflamed the existing anger of many Democratic and liberal-leaning women and relit the fire that coursed through the Sanders-Clinton primary and beyond. >
- Rightly or wrongly, Warren's polling numbers among voters have fallen, while Sanders' polling has held steady or improved. It's yet to be seen if the incident alters long-term fund-raising for either candidate, but it might. For his part, Sanders has seen a post-debate surge in funding .
So far, in other words, most of the damage has been borne by Warren as a result of the incident. She may recover, but this could also end her candidacy by accelerating a decline that started with public reaction to her recent stand on Medicare For All. None of this is certain to continue, but these are the trends.
... ... ...
But if Warren's candidacy becomes unviable, as it seems it might -- and if the goal of both camps is truly to defeat Joe Biden -- it's incumbent on Warren to drop out and endorse her "friend and ally" Bernie Sanders as soon as it's clear she can no longer win . (The same is true if Sanders becomes unviable, though that seems much less likely.)
Ms. Warren can do whatever she wants, certainly. But if she does anything less than help elect the last and only progressive with a chance, she damages them both to Biden's benefit, and frankly, helps nominate Biden. She has the right to do that, but not to claim at the same time that she's working to further the progressive movement.
TG , January 21, 2020 at 12:19 am
Bottom line: the corporate press has gone all-in on Warren. She simply MUST be a whore, like Obama, or Hilary/Bill Clinton. If Warren were a real progressive, the big money would never go for her like this.
I will vote for Bernie Sanders. But I will vote for Trump over Warren. Better the moron and agent of chaos that you know, than the calculating vicious backstabber that you don't.
Lambert Strether , January 21, 2020 at 3:26 am
> She simply MUST be a wh0re,
I deprecate the comparison, as insulting to wh0res. See at NC here.
Phillip Allen , January 21, 2020 at 6:48 am
"She simply MUST be a mercenary, like Obama; might be more apt.
Lee , January 21, 2020 at 8:26 am
I favor the term "corporate lickspittle".
russell1200 , January 21, 2020 at 8:47 am
She's got the Clinton's and now Obama folks behind her.
I doubt they are thrilled with her, but probably view as someone they can work with and the other options are worse or too low in the poll numbers. I assume Buttigieg is fine with them, but his numbers are stuck.
doug , January 21, 2020 at 11:28 am
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/21/politics/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-documentary/index.html
You are so right. Hillary says she will not support him if the nominee. Gloves are off. I hope the Sanders campaign has some Karl Rove types .
Amfortas the hippie , January 21, 2020 at 1:54 pm
from the sidebar of that link: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/21/politics/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-2020/index.html
from cilizza, no less. that Hilary speaking thusly is actually good for sanders.
False Solace , January 21, 2020 at 11:17 am
Personally I cannot consider voting for a drone murderer like Trump, who cozies up to the Saudis and has tried to cut SS and Medicare. He's shown what he is, just as Warren has. We'll never get M4A from either one of them.
If it's not Bernie I'm voting Green. I live in a blue state that almost went for Trump last time – my vote potentially matters and will serve as a signal. Voting for the lesser murderous corporatist scum is what got us into this mess. I'm over it. I will not vote for evil.
HotFlash , January 21, 2020 at 3:49 pm
In 2016 I might just have voted for Trump, as a middle finger to the Dem establishment that crowned HRH HRC, since at that time he had not committed any war crimes. But now, no way. One of my unshakeable principles is that I will not vote for a war criminal. Green , write-in, or leave the Pres slot blank. But I hope and pray (and I'm an atheist!) that it doesn't come to this. We really don't have another 4 years to waste on this, the earth can't wait.
Anon , January 21, 2020 at 12:41 am
It's very unfortunate that it has come to this, but I've always been uneasy about Warren. This incident and her accusations against Bernie solidified my suspicions about her. Her being a Republican until her late 40s, her lies about sending her child to public school, her lies about her father being a janitor, her plagiarized cookbook recipes, and claiming to be Native American. It's all so bizarre to me and for a while I had believed her to have a personality disorder that caused compulsive lying. I wanted to feel good about my vote for Warren, but now? If she wins the nomination I'll hold my nose and vote for her, but I don't trust her to not sell out to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. I also don't trust her to endorse Bernie if she drops out before the convention. She didn't endorse him in '16, so what makes progressives think she'll do so this time. It would not surprise me in the least if she endorsed Biden or agrees to be his running mate.
Lambert Strether , January 21, 2020 at 3:27 am
Warren is not agreement-capable. Much as it pains me to say this, the Obama administration was correct to hold her at arm's length.
Adding, that doesn't mean that Sanders can't negotiate with her, if that must be done (to defeat Trump). But any such negotiations cannot proceed on a basis of trust.
JohnnyGL , January 21, 2020 at 8:13 am
The most generous interpretation i can come up with is that i's possible she told the story to several of her clintonite staffers in confidence. Those staffers went to CNN and forced her to stand by her story, even if she didn't want to go public, because she was threatened with staffers calling her a liar.
She might have been mad at Bernie for not bailing her out.
This version, which i don't believe, but consider it possible (not plausible) would be arguably as bad because her staffers got the upper hand and pushed her around.
John Wright , January 21, 2020 at 10:17 am
Warren could have said something to the effect that
"Bernie and I had a private conversation and I believe he suggested that electing a woman president in the USA would be difficult."
"Unfortunately, I mentioned this private conversation to some staffers, who apparently mentioned this to the press."
"This does not mean that I believe Bernie to be sexist."
"I appreciate opinions and advice from someone as experienced as Bernie."
"I want others to know that, private advice supplied to me by anyone will be treated as private information, not to be divulged to the press."
"The staffer responsible for passing this information to the press has been released from the campaign."
"I apologize to Bernie for allowing this to happen."
Reply ↓jrs , January 21, 2020 at 12:29 pm
The problem is the country has become so irrational and susceptible to soundbites and twitter shame and etc. that you can't even say "electing a women president would be difficult" which might be true, or it becomes like Hillary's deplorable remark, we all know it's true some Trump supporters fit the description, but it gets taken way out of context and exaggerated beyond all recognition.
Reply ↓Oh , January 21, 2020 at 10:26 am
The "invisible hand" of the Clinton Staffers then forced her not to shake Bernie's hand, I take it.
Reply ↓jrs , January 21, 2020 at 12:25 pm
She didn't even have to deny it. Should could have just been "That was a private conversation, I will not go into what was said in private. Bernie is a good friend of mine, who has supported women candidates on many occasions".
Reply ↓none , January 21, 2020 at 12:46 am
Warren will never endorse Bernie. She is not a progressive and the Republican in her is back in operation. But, there is a new Jeep named after her:
Reply ↓Henry Moon Pie , January 21, 2020 at 1:41 am
But we already had the Tin Lizzie.
Reply ↓ambrit , January 21, 2020 at 6:30 am
I can't resist.
Reply ↓
What we have here is an old fashioned "Lizzie-Faire Capitalist."
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Oct 30, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
Is it any wonder that the nation's "liberal" cable news stations CNN and MSNBC can barely contain their disdain for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign and even (to a lesser degree) for that of Elizabeth Warren while they promote the nauseating center-right candidacies of the bewildered racist and corporatist Joe Biden, the sinister neoliberal corporate-militarist Pete Butiggieg and even the marginal Wall Street "moderates" Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris?
Next time you click on these stations, keep a pen and paper handy to write down the names of the corporations that pay for their broadcast content with big money commercial purchases.
I did that at various times of day on three separate occasions last week. Here are the companies I found buying ads at CNN and MSDNC:
American Advisors Group (AAG), the top lender the American reverse mortgage industry (with Tom Selleck telling seniors to trust him that reverse mortgages are not a rip off)
United Health Care, for-profit "managed health care company" with 300,000 employers and an annual revenue of $226 billion, ranked sixth on the 2019 Fortune 500.
Menards, the nation's third largest home improvement chain, with revenue over $10 billion in 2017.
CHANITX, a drug to get off cigarettes ("slow Turkey") sold by the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer, 65th on the Fortune 500.
Tom Steyer (billionaire for president)
Lincoln Financial, 187 th on the Fortune 500, an American holding company that controls multiple insurance and investment management businesses.
Liberty Mutual, an insurance company with more than 50,000 employees in more than 900 locations and ranked 68 th on the Fortune 500 two years ago.
Allstate Insurance: 79 th on the Fortune 500, with more than 45,000 employees.
INFINITI Suburban Utility Vehicle (new price ranging from 37K to 60K), produced by Nissan, the sixth largest auto-making corporation in the world.
RCN (annual revenue of $636 million) WiFi for business
Jaguar Elite luxury autos.
Porsche luxury autos, selling new models priced at $115,000, $145,000, and $163,00, and $294,000.
Mercedes Benz luxury auto, including an SRL-Class model that starts at $498,000
Capital Group, one of the world's oldest and biggest investment management firms, with $1.87 trillion in assets under its control.
Otezla, a plaque psoriasis drug, developed by the New Jersey drug company Celgene and owned by Amgene, a leading California-based biotechnology firm with total assets of $78 billion.
Trelegy, a CPD drug produced by the British company GSK, the world's seventh leading pharmaceutical corporation, with the fourth largest capitalization of any company on the London Stock Exchange.
HunterDouglass – elite windows made by a Dutch multinational corporation with more than 23,000 employees and locations in more than 70 countries.
Humira – drug for Crohn's disease and other ailments, manufactured by Abbvie, with 28,000 global employees and total assets of $59 billion.
Primateme Mist – for breathing, produced by Amphastar Pharmaceuticals.
Glucerna – drug for diabetes, produced by Abbot Laboratories, an American medical company with more than 100,00 employees and total assets of $67 billion.
Prevagen – a controversial drug for brain health produced by Quincy Bioscience
DISCOVER Credit Card, the third largest credit card brand in the U.S., with total assets of $92 billion.
Fidelity Investments, an American multinational financial services corporation with more than 50,000 employees and an operating income of $5.3 billion.
Cadillac XT-6 high-end SUV, starting at $53K, made by General Motors (no. 10 on the Fortune 500 for total revenue), which makes automobiles in 37 countries, employees 173,000 persons, and has total assets $227 billion.
Comfort Inn, owned by Choice Hotels, one of the largest hotel chains in the world, franchising 7,005 properties in 41 countries and territories.
Audible/Amazon – books on tape from the world's biggest mega-corporation Amazon, ranked fifth on the Fortune 500, with 647,000 employees and total assets of $163 billion.
Ring Home Security, owned by Amazon
Coventry Health Insurance, no. 168 on the Fortune 500
SANDALS Resorts International, with 16 elite resort properties in the Caribbean.
Cigna Medicare Advantage, owned by the national health insurer Cigna, no. 229 on the Fortune 500
SoFi Finance, an online personal finance company that provides student loan refinancing, mortgages and personal loans.
Ameriprise Finance, an investment services firm, no. 240 on F500.
It's not for nothing that bit Fortune 500 firms are represented in my anecdotal sponsor list above. Last summer, SQAD MediaCosts reported that a 30-second commercial during CNN's prime-time lineup (Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, and Don Lemon), cost between $7,000 and $12,000. The price has certainly gone up significantly now that Trumpeachment is bringing in new eyeballs.
The three most prominent and recurrent advertising streams appear (anecdotally) to come from Big Pharma (the leading drug companies), insurance (health insurance above all), and finance (investment services/wealth management). These giant concentrated corporate and industry sectors are naturally opposed to the financial regulation and anti-trust policy that Senator Warren says she wants to advance. Amazon can hardly be expected to back the big-tech break-up that Warren advocates.
Big corporate lenders certainly have no interest in making college tuition free, a Sanders promise that would slash a major profit source for finance capital.
The big health insurance firms are naturally opposed both to the Single Payer national health insurance plan that Sanders puts at the top of his platform and to the milder version of Medicare for All that Warren says she backs. Warren and especially Sanders pledge to remove the parasitic, highly expensive profit motive from health insurance and to make publicly funded quality and affordable health care a human right in the U.S. The corporate insurance mafia is existentially opposed to such human decency.
Both of the "progressive Democratic candidates" (a description that fits Sanders far better than it does Warren) loudly promise to slash drug costs, something Pfizer, Abbvie, Amgene, Amphastar, and Abbot Labs can hardly be expected to relish.
None of the big companies buying advertising time on CNN and MSNBC have any interest in the progressive taxation and restored union organizing and collective bargaining rights that Sanders advocates.
The big financial services firms paying for media content on "liberal" cable news stations primarily serve affluent clients, many if not most of whom are likely to oppose increased taxes on the well off.
The resort, tourism, luxury car, and business travel firms that buy commercials on these networks are hardly about to back policies leading to the real or potential reduction of discretionary income enjoyed by upper middle class and rich people.
So, gosh, who do these corporate and financial interests favor in the 2020 presidential election? Neoliberal Corporatists like Joe Biden, Pete Butiggieg, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar, of course. Dutifully obedient to the preferences and commands of the nation's unelected dictatorship of money, these insipid corporate Democrats loyally claim that Sanders and Warren want to viciously "tax the middle class" to pay for supposedly unaffordable excesses like Medicare for All and the existentially necessary Green New Deal.
In reality, Single Payer and giant green jobs programs and more that We the People need and want are eminently affordable if the United States follows Sanders' counsel by adequately and progressively taxing its absurdly wealthy over-class (the top tenth of the upper 1% than owns more than 90% of U.S. wealth) and its giant, surplus-saturated corporations and financial institutions. At the same time, as Warren keeps trying to explain, the cost savings for ordinary Americans will be enormous with the profits system taken out of health insurance.
Sanders reminds voters that there's no way to calculate the cost savings of keeping livable ecology alive for future generations. The climate catastrophe is a grave existential threat to the whole species.
These are basic arguments of elementary social, environmental, and democratic decency that the investors and managers behind and atop big corporations buying commercials on CNN and MSNBC don't want heard. As a result, CNN and MSDNC "debate" moderators and talking heads persist in purveying the, well, fake news, that Sanders doesn't know how to pay Single Payer, free public college, and a Green New Deal.
It's not for nothing that CNN and MSNBC have promoted the hapless Biden over and above Sanders and Warren – this notwithstanding the former Vice President's ever more obvious and embarrassing inadequacy as a candidate.
It's not for nothing that MSNBC and CNN have habitually warned against the supposed "socialist" menace posed by the highly popular Sanders (a New Deal progressive at leftmost) while refusing to properly describe Trump's White House and his dedicated base as pro-fascists. MSDNC has even get a weekly segment to the silver-spooned multi-millionaire advertising executive Donny Deutsch after he said the following on the network last winter:
"I find Donald Trump reprehensible as a human being, but a socialist candidate is more dangerous to this company, country, as far as the strength and well-being of the country, than Donald Trump. I would vote for Donald Trump, a despicable human being I will be so distraught to the point that that could even come out of my mouth, if we have a socialist [Democratic presidential candidate or president] because that will take our country so down, and we are not Denmark. I love Denmark, but that's not who we are. And if you love who we are and all the great things that still have to have binders put on the side. Please step away from the socialism."
It's not for nothing that the liberal cable networks go out of their way to deny Sanders remotely appropriate broadcast time. Or that they habitually and absurdly frame Single Payer health insurance not as the great civilizing social and human rights victory it would be (the long-overdue cost-slashing de-commodification of health care coverage combined with the provision of health care for all regardless of social status and class) but rather as a dangerous and authoritarian assault on Americans' existing (and unmentionably inadequate and over-expensive) health insurance.
Dare we mention that the lords of capital who pay for cable news salaries and content are heavily invested in the fossil fuels and in the relentless economic growth that are pushing the planet rapidly towards environmental tipping points that gravely endanger prospects for a decent and organized human existence in coming decades?
It's not for nothing that the progressive measures advanced by Sanders and supported by most Americans are regularly treated as "unrealistic," "irresponsible," "too radical," "too idealistic," "impractical," and "too expensive."
It's for nothing that Sanders is commonly left out of the liberal cable networks' campaign coverage and "horse race" discussions even as he enjoys the highest approval rating among all the candidates in the running.
With their preferred centrist candidate Joe Biden having performed in a predictably poor and buffoonish fashion (Biden was a terrible, gaffe-prone politician well before his brains started coming out of his ears) falling back into something like a three-way tie with the liberal Warren and the populist progressive Sanders, the liberal cable talking heads and debate moderators have naturally tried to boost "moderate" neoliberal-corporatist "second" and "third tier" Democratic presidential candidates like Butiggieg, Klobuchar and the surprisingly weak Kamala Harris. It's not for nothing that these and other marginal corporate candidates (e.g. Beto O'Rourke) get outsized attention on "liberal" cable stations regardless of their tiny support bases. Even if they can't win, these small-time contenders take constant neoliberal jabs at Sanders and even at the more clearly corporate-co-optable Warren (who proudly describes herself as "capitalist in my bones").
Thanks to Harris's curiously weak showing, Biden's dotard-like absurdity, and the likely non-viability of Butiggieg (the U.S. is not yet primed for two men and a baby in the White House), the not-so liberal cable channels are now joining the New Yok Times and Washington Post in gently floating the possibility of a dark-horse neoliberal Democratic Party newcomer (Michael Bloomberg, John Kerry, Michelle Obama, Sherrod Brown, and maybe even Hillary Clinton herself) to fill Joke Biden's Goldman-and Citigroup-approved shoes in the coming primary and Caucus battles with "radical socialist" Bernie and (not-so) "left" Warren.
So what if running an establishment Obama-Clinton-Citigroup-Council on Foreign Relations Democrat in 2020 will de-mobilize much of the nation's progressive electoral base, helping the malignant white nationalist monster Donald Trump get a second term?
As the old working-class slogan says, "money talks and bullshit walks."
"Follow the money" is the longstanding mantra in campaign finance research and criminal prosecution. It should also apply to our understanding of the dominant media's political news content. U.S. media managers are employed by giant corporations (MSNBC is a division of Comcast NBC Universal, no. 71 on the Fortune 500 and CNN is owned by Turner Broadcasting, no, 68 on the Fortune 500) that are naturally reluctant to publish or broadcast material that might offend the wealthy capitalist interests that pay for broadcasting by purchasing advertisements. As Noam Chomsky has noted, large corporations are not only the major producers of the United States' mass commercial media. They are also that media's top market, something that deepens the captivity of nation's supposedly democratic and independent media to big capital:
"The reliance of a journal on advertisers shapes and controls and substantially determines what is presented to the public the very idea of advertiser reliance radically distorts the concept of free media. If you think about what the commercial media are, no matter what, they are businesses. And a business produces something for a market. The producers in this case, almost without exception, are major corporations. The market is other businesses – advertisers. The product that is presented to the market is readers (or viewers), so these are basically major corporations providing audiences to other businesses, and that significantly shapes the nature of the institution."
At the same time, both U.S. corporate media managers and the advertisers who supply revenue for their salaries are hesitant to produce content that might alienate affluent folks – the people who hire pricey investment advisors, go to Caribbean resorts and buy Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes and count for an ever-rising share of U.S. consumer purchases. It is those with the most purchasing power who are naturally most targeted by advertisers.
Money talks, bullshit talks on "liberal" cable news, as in the legal and party and elections systems and indeed across all of society.
Watch the wannabe fascist strongman Trump walk to a second term with no small help from a "liberal" corporate media whose primary goal is serving corporate sponsors and its own bottom line, not serving social justice, environmental sanity, and democracy – or even helping Democrats win elections.
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
The president base is clarly more narrow then in 2016: he used anti-war repiblicansand independents aswell as "Anybody but Hillary" voters (large part of Sanders votrs). Part of military is now Tulsi supported and probalywill not vote at all, at least they will not vote for Trump.
Fox News 's Tucker Carlson on Monday warned Republicans not to get complacent, and that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) could wind up taking "many thousands " of votes from President Trump if he is able to secure the Democratic nomination, according to The Hill 's Joe Concha.
"A year from today, we'll be hosting this show from the National Mall as the next president of the United States takes the oath of office," said Carlson, adding "Will that president be Donald Trump? As of tonight, Republicans in Washington feel confident it will be."
"The official economic numbers are strong. The Democratic primaries are a freak show -- elderly socialists accusing each other of thoughtcrimes. Republicans are starting to think victory is assured. That's a mistake ," said Carlson. "America remains as divided as it was three years ago. No matter what happens, nobody's going to win this election in a national landslide. Those don't happen anymore. Trump could lose. Will he? That depends on what he runs on. "Carlson then showed numbers for Trump on the economy that show while the main indicators are strong, there are some other numbers that should concern the president. He pointed to a Pew Research study that shows just 31 percent of Americans say the economy is helping them and their families, and just 32 percent say they believe the current economy helps the middle class.
Carlson then pivoted to Sanders's potential appeal to certain voter groups and said Republicans need a plan to battle that appeal.
" Bernie Sanders may get the Democratic nomination ," Carlson said. " If he does, every Republican in Washington will spend the next 10 months reminding you that socialism doesn't work , and never has. They'll be right, obviously," Carlson explained. - The Hill
So what's Bernie's appeal?
Recall that a not-insignificant Sanders supporters voted for Trump out of disgust following revelations that Hillary Clinton and the DNC conspirted to rig the 2016 primary against him.
According to Carlson, however, "if Sanders pledges to forgive student loans, he'll still win many thousands of voters who went for Donald Trump last time. Debt is crushing an entire generation of Americans. Republicans need a plan to make it better, or they'll be left behind."
"They're conservative in the most basic sense: They love their families above all," the host concluded. "They distrust radical theories of anything because they know that when the world turns upside down, ordinary people get hurt. They don't want to burn it down. They just want things to get better. The candidate who promises to make them better -- incrementally, but tangibly -- will be inaugurated president a year from today."
According to a RealClearPolitics average of seven (oh so reliable) polls, Sanders would take Trump if he gets the nomination. Tags Politics
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MANvsMACHINE , 3 minutes ago link
Mustafa Kemal , 2 minutes ago linkBernie doesn't have a ******* chance once he has to debate Trump. Trump will pull every straggly hair from Bernie's nearly bald head.
Boogity , 6 minutes ago linkI disagree. Trump hasnt had to debate someone with character and intelligence before.
Carlson is right. The overwhelming majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck with many working two jobs to make ends meet. The economy sucks for the working and middle class. Facts are stubborn things.
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
none , January 21, 2020 at 12:46 am
Warren will never endorse Bernie. She is not a progressive and the Republican in her is back in operation. But, there is a new Jeep named after her:
Henry Moon Pie , January 21, 2020 at 1:41 am
But we already had the Tin Lizzie.
ambrit , January 21, 2020 at 6:30 am
I can't resist. What we have here is an old fashioned "Lizzie-Faire Capitalist."
John Zelnicker , January 21, 2020 at 10:28 am
@ambrit
January 21, 2020 at 6:30 am
-- -- -"Strike three! A sizzling fast ball over the middle of the plate, while the batter just looked dumbfounded"
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
sounds very much like it, in a kind of ham-fisted, virtue-signaling way -- "Sometimes I fear the American people are still too bigoted to vote for a woman," or something like that. Yet every Clinton staffer was muttering the same thing under her breath at 3 a.m. on November 9, 2016.What's more, Mrs. Warren never denied that Mr. Sanders only ran in the last election cycle because she declined to do so. Nor can anyone forget how vigorously he campaigned for Mrs. Clinton, even after she and the DNC rigged the primary against him. If Mrs. Warren and her surrogates at CNN are claiming that Bernie meant that a person with two X chromosomes is biologically incapable of serving as president, they're lying through their teeth.
This is how Liz treats her "friend" Bernie -- and when he denies that absurd smear, she refuses to shake his hand and accuses him of calling her a liar on national television. Then, of course, the #MeToo brigades line up to castigate him for having the temerity to defend himself -- further evidence, of course, of his sexism. I mean, like, Bernie is, like, literally Weinstein.
Then there's the "Latinx" thing, which is the absolute summit of progressive elites' disconnect with ordinary Americans. In case you didn't know, Mrs. Warren has been roundly panned for referring to Hispanics by this weird neologism, which was invented by her comrades in the ivory tower as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina . The thing is, Spanish is a gendered language. What's more, a poll by the left-wing market research group Think Now found that just 2 percent of Hispanics call themselves "Latinx." (In fact, most prefer the conventional "Hispanic," which is now verboten on the Left because it hearkens back to Christopher Columbus's discovery of La Española .)
So here comes Professor Warren -- white as Wonder Bread, the mattress in her Cambridge townhouse stuffed with 12 million big ones -- trying to rewrite the Spanish language because she thinks it's sexist. How she's made it this far in the primary is absolutely mind-boggling. She doesn't care about Hispanics, much less their culture. Like every employee of the modern education system, she's only interested in processing American citizens into gluten-free offal tubes of political correctness.
Of course, if one of her primary opponents or a cable news "Democratic strategist" (whatever that is) dared to say as much, they'd be hung, drawn, and quartered. Partisan Democrats have trained themselves not to think in such terms. That might not matter much if Mrs. Warren was facing Mitt Romney or John McCain in the general. But she's not. If she wins the primary, she'll be up against Donald Trump. And if you don't think he'll say all of this -- and a whole lot more -- you should apply for a job at CNN.
Very Funny Mr. President • a day ago
... running against Mrs. Warren would be a walk in the parkUp North Very Funny Mr. President • 11 hours ago • editedYour imaginary Trump anti-Warren schtick might have worked in 2016, but boy does it come off as unfunny and stale in 2020. He's done too much damage. Not funny anymore. I voted for Trump. After all his betrayals, Warren could rip him to pieces just by standing next to him without saying a word. Her WASP reserve and Okie roots might even seem refreshing after our four-year long cesspool shower with this New York City creep.
Didn't vote for Trump, or Clinton for that matter, cast a protest Libertarian vote. In my red state it hardly matters, but the electoral college is another story. But observed long ago that indeed Warren is just what the author says, a too politically correct north east liberal who would be demolished in the presidential election against Trump. Only Biden or Klobuchar has a chance to unseat the orange man, or maybe better yet a Biden - Klobuchar ticket.Great CoB Up North • 6 hours agoI've sometimes voted red and sometimes blue, but a Trump Vs Biden contest might well make me bored and disappointed enough to join you going libertarian.cka2nd Up North • 4 hours agoIf the Dems want to lose, Biden and Klobuchar would be a quick ticket to doing so. Warren would get the job done not much slower, unless she pivoted away from social issues.Lloyd Conway cka2nd • 3 hours agoTo quote Phyllis Schlafly's advice to conservatives and the GOP, what the Dems need is "A choice, not an echo." Sanders is the closest the Dems have of offering the voters a real choice, and is the best option to defeat Trump. The D establishment will still pull out all the stops to try to block him, of course, because even they and their big donors would prefer a second Trump term over a New Deal liberal with a socialist gloss, but they may not succeed this time.
Bernie and Tulsi are the most honest and interesting of the Democratic field, even though their politics generally aren't mine. Nonetheless, I wish them well, because they appear to say what they actually think, as opposed to whatever their operatives have focus-group tested.Mediaistheenemy Up North • 4 hours agoBiden's corruption will come out in the general. We could write up articles of impeachment now. After all, Biden, did actually bribe the Ukraine. He said so himself. On video.Great CoB Very Funny Mr. President • 6 hours agoI think Trump's unfortunately stronger now than he was in 2016. Clinton's attacks on him were painting him as an apocalyptic candidate who would bring America crashing down. By serving as president for 4 years with a mostly booming economy, Trump's proven them wrong. The corporate media will continue their hysterical attacks on him though, and that will boost his support. I think Hillary Clinton was more dislikeable back then than Warren is now, but Warren is probably even more out of touch. The others might also lose, but she really as a terrible candidate.Mediaistheenemy Very Funny Mr. President • 4 hours agoWhat damage has Trump done, as opposed to the damage the media/Dems/deepstate's RESPONSE to Trump has done?John D • 21 hours ago
Trump has reduced illegal immigration with the expected subsequent increases in employment and wages, saved taxpayer 1 TRILLION dollars by withdrawing from the Paris accord, killed 2 leading terrorists (finally showing Iran that we aren't their bakshi boys), cut taxes, stood up for gun rights, reduced harmful governmental regulation, and appointed judges that will follow the law instead of feelings and popular culture.
He is also exposing the deep underbelly of the corrupt government in Washington, especially the coup organized between Obama, Hillary, the DNC, Brennan, Comey, Clapper and the hyperpartisan acts of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, IRS and now the GAO (unless you believe that the "non-partisan" GAO released their report which claimed Trump violated the law by holding up Ukranian funds for a few months within the same fiscal year on the same day Nancy forwarded the articles of impeachment by some amazing coincidence).
The problem isn't Trump. The problem is the liars opposing the existential threat Trump poses to the elitists who despise America.Three years of Trump has made "academic elitist" look pretty appealing.Mediaistheenemy John D • 4 hours agoTo whom?New Pres Please • 19 hours ago"For all my reservations about Mr. Trump -- his lagging commitment toMediaistheenemy New Pres Please • 4 hours ago
protectionism, his shafting of Amy Coney Barrett, his deportation of
Iraqi Christians, his burgeoning hawkishness, his total lack of
decorum -- he's infinitely preferable to anyone the Democrats could
nominate."You gloss over a few dozen other failures, most of them bigger than anything you mention here (immigration, infrastructure, more mass surveillance and privacy violations by govt and corporations than even Obama).
You realize that the progress Trump has made on immigration is why unemployment is down and wages are up, right?Ray Woodcock • 17 hours ago
Most Americans think that's a good thing.
Democrats, not so much.I think I disliked the last thing I saw by Davis. Whatever. This one is better. Not perfect -- some of it is out of touch -- but he makes a case. And, sad to say, I concur with his prediction for the election, with or without Warren.Maybe • 14 hours agoI'm starting to like her. I thought she handled herself well at the last debate. "Presidential". It's been quite a while since we had a real president. Too long.cka2nd Maybe • 4 hours agoForgive me, but Democratic voters put way too much store in presidents being Presidential. And they spent way too much time talking about Bush's verbal gaffes and Trump's disgusting personality to get Gore, Kerry or H. Clinton elected.Angelo Bonilla • 11 hours ago • editedI am Hispanic and don't know anybody that call himself by that silly term "Latinx".Connecticut Farmer Angelo Bonilla • 9 hours agoAs the author wrote, it was invented by academics. One problem with the Democrat Party is that it is teeming with Professor Kingsfield types who are as much connected with the rest of the population as I am with aborigines.Kevin Burke • 10 hours agoFinally someone said what most people think. Love the imagined Trump comments to Warren..."Relax. Put on a nice sweater, have a cup of tea, grade some papers." As i read those I heard Trump's unique way of speech and was laughing out loud. BTW...Tulsi Gabbard is such an attractive candidate...heard her interviewed on Tucker Carlson and I think could present a real challenge to Trump if she ever rose up to face him in a debate. It's curious someone like Warren shoots to the top, while she remains in the back of the line.Mediaistheenemy Kevin Burke • 3 hours agoThe media deliberately shut her down, just like they are shutting down Bernie. The DNC also doesn't like her (possibly because she resigned as cochair and is critical of Hillary) and seems to have chosen their debate criteria -which surveys they accept-in order to shut her out. I liked her up until she objected to taking out Soleimani-a known terrorist in the middle of a war zone planning attacks on US assets.wakeupmorons • 10 hours ago • edited
Sorry, Trump was spot on in this attack. Tulsi was completely wrong. However, she is honest, experienced, knowledgeable and not psychotic, a refreshing change from the other Dem Presidential candidates. If you haven't figured out yet that CNN is basically the media arm of Warren's campaign, you haven't been paying attention. That is how Warren continues to poll reasonably well.These arguments amaze me. "Since your candidate is too school marmy, or elitist, or (insert usual democrat insult here), you're giving the electorate no choice but to vote for the most corrupt, openly racist, sexist, psychologically lying, dangerously mentally deranged imbecile in the country".Connecticut Farmer wakeupmorons • 8 hours agoBecause rather than an educated person who maybe comes off as an elitist, we'd rather have a disgusting deplorable who no sane parent would allow in the same room with their daughter.
Lol, and yet writers like this don't even realize the insanity of what they're saying, which is basically "that bagel is 2 days old, so I have choice but to eat this steaming pile of dog crap instead".
"Because rather than an educated person who maybe comes off as an elitist, we'd rather have a disgusting deplorable who no sane parent would allow in the same room with their daughter."wakeupmorons Connecticut Farmer • 8 hours agoNo need for the ad hominem, you are overstating your case. Remember, Trump is "educated" too. And a card-carrying member of the elite. Leave us not kid ourselves, they're all "elites" of one stripe or another. It only matters which stripe we prefer, meaning of course whether they are saying what we want to hear. Of all of the candidates, the only one who does not come off as an "elite" is Tulsi Gabbard, an intelligent woman who is arguably the most interesting of all the candidates--in part because of her active military service. I'd even throw in Andrew Yang, a friendly, engaging person who didn't seem to have an ax to grind. It matters not. Yang is out of the picture and Gabbard has as much of a crack at the Democratic nomination in 2020 as Rand Paul had at the Republican nomination in 2016--essentially zero.
Lol trump is educated too? You've lose all credibility with such comical false equivalencies.David Naas wakeupmorons • 7 hours agoTrump is an absolute imbecile who has failed up his entire life thanks to daddy's endless fortune. If he we born Donald Smith he'd be pumping gas in Jersey, or in jail as a low life con man.
While I find myself shocked to be found defending anything Trumpean, in all fairness, he is a college grad-u-ate (shades of Lily Tomlin). The value, depth, or scope of his degree may be in question, but he does possess a sheep-skin, and hence must be considered "educated". If one wants to demean his "education" because of his personality, one must also demean a rather broad segment of college grad-u-ates as well.Connecticut Farmer wakeupmorons • 7 hours agoHe graduated from Penn's Wharton School of Business, ergo he is educated. Because a person doesn't hold the same political beliefs as another doesn't mean they can't be "educated." Liz Warren may not hold the same political beliefs as I, but I cannot argue that she isn't educated.wakeupmorons Connecticut Farmer • 6 hours agoLol wow, well I'd say it's hilarious that anyone can be so naive to actually think a compete imbecile like trump, who so clearly has never read a book in his life, actually earned his way into college; let alone actually studied and earned a degree.....but then I remember this country is obviously filled with people this remarkable gullible and stupid, as this walking SNL sketch is actually President.cka2nd wakeupmorons • 4 hours agoI actually think you are spot on in your assessment of what Trump would have become if he wasn't born to money, but you really are behaving like exactly that kind of Democratic voter who gets more exorcised by Trump's personal faults than by his policy ones, the kind of Democrats who couldn't get Al Gore, John Kerry and Hilary Clinton elected.Mediaistheenemy cka2nd • 3 hours agoReally. You think someone that managed to become President of the United States with no political or military experience would have failed at life if he hadn't had a wealthy father. You really believe that. You don't think any of Trump's success and accomplishments are due to his ambition, drive, energy, determination, executive skills, ruthlessness or media savvy. It was all due to his having a rich father.wakeupmorons Mediaistheenemy • 3 hours ago • edited
Fascinating.Trump has had no success. He's failed at everything he's ever done. You obviously just know nothing about his actual life, and believe the made up reality TV bullshit.cka2nd Mediaistheenemy • 2 hours agoThe only thing he's good at is playing a rich successful man on TV to really, really, stupid, unread, unworldly, naive people....well that and giving racists white nationalists, the billionaire owner class, sexists, bigots, and deplorables, a political home.
I think Trump is and would have been, sans his father's wealth, one hell of a con man. And I hope to God that he would have ended up in jail for it rather than running a private equity fund, but the latter would have been just as likely.wakeupmorons cka2nd • 2 hours ago • editedHowever, I should have made that distinction in my original comment. No, I do not think that Trump would have ended up a gas station attendant.
It's very hard for me to understand how anyone could be so, shall we say sheltered, that they couldn't see him coming a mile away and laugh their ass off.wakeupmorons cka2nd • 2 hours agoHe's so bad, so transparent with his obvious lies and self aggrandizing, so clearly ignorant and unread and trying to fake it, he's literally like a cartoon's funny over the top version of an idiot con man. I'll never understand how anyone could ever be fooled by it.
In fact sometimes I think 90% of his base isn't fooled, they know he's a joke, but they just don't care. He gives them the white nationalist hate and rhetoric they want, makes "liberals cry", and that all they care about.
It's a lot easier for me to believe THAT then so many people can actually be so stupid and gullible.
Say what? What policies? The trillion dollar hand out to the richest corporations in the world, double the deficit? His mind blowing disastrous foreign policy decisions that have done nothing but empowered Russia, Iran and North Korea while destabilizing western alliances? The trade wars that have cost fairness and others billions (forcing taxpayers to bail them out with tens of millions of dollars)? The xenophobia, separating and caging children? Stoking violence and hate and anger among his white nationalist base? His attacks on women reproductive rights? His attacks on all of our democratic institutions, from our free press to our intelligence agencies and congressional oversights?CrossTieWalker wakeupmorons • 2 hours agoA pathologically lying racist sexist self serving criminal is enough to disqualify this miscreant from being dog catcher, let alone president. But his policies are even worse.
You don't seem to know that the University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League school, or what the Wharton School of Business actually is. Imbeciles do not graduate from the Wharton School.Mediaistheenemy wakeupmorons • 3 hours agoYou think Trump won the US Presidency as his first elected office by being an imbecile?wakeupmorons Mediaistheenemy • 3 hours ago
Interesting "analysis".Lol, trump is an imbecile, that's not even debatable. What amazes the rest of the entire civilized world outside of the batshit fringe 20% of Americans who make up the Republican voting base is how anyone could possible be conned by such a cartoonish idiot wanna be con man.Tony55398 • 9 hours agoIt's truly something sane people can't even begin to wrap their heads around.
Pocahontas speak with forked tongue.Lloyd Conway • 9 hours agoThe Dowager Countess (Downton Abbey, for the un-initiated) nailed her type. In referring to her do-gooder cousin Mrs. Isobel Crawley, she said: "Some people run on greed, lust, even love. She runs on indignation." That sums up Warren perfectly.David Naas Lloyd Conway • 7 hours ago
I'll take it one step further. I bought one of her books, on the 'two-income trap' and how middle-class families go to the wall to get into good school districts for their children. She and her co-author make some valid points, but the book is replete with cliches about men abandoning their families and similar leftist tropes. If that's the best Harvard Law Warren has to offer, she's not as sharp as she thinks she is, and a bully like Trump will school her fast.Perhaps he would use "Harvard Law Liz" as an epithet?Lloyd Conway David Naas • 3 hours ago • editedMaybe. Perhaps she'll coin 'Wharton Hog' for the POTUS - or try correcting his English during one of the debates.Stephen Gould • 8 hours agoEvidently Mr Davis dislikes Warren because of her personal style - but all of Trump's substantive (or even, substance...) issues are acceptable. How shallow of him.Mediaistheenemy Stephen Gould • 3 hours agoI think he also dislikes her fundamental dishonesty and completely unworkable policies, but I may be projecting.Stephen Gould Mediaistheenemy • 2 hours agoBut those he did not mention in his article. And surely nobody thinks that Warren is more dishonest than Trump?Tim • 7 hours agoI can't say the two of us exactly line up on everything. But, like Wow: "gluten-free offal tubes of political correctness." Now that's funny! Wish I'd thought of it.Osse • 7 hours ago • editedI liked Warren until this attempt to stab Bernie in the back plus that childish refusal to shake his hand on national TV. I still don't dislike her, but that was embarrassing. She definitely has character flaws.Mediaistheenemy Osse • 3 hours agoBut this piece goes over the top. It's Trumpian. Warren certainly has flaws but if you are going to judge a politician by their character, in what universe would Trump come out on top?
Better than Warren.wakeupmorons Osse • 2 hours ago
The problem with affirmative action is when you abuse it, as Warren did, you actually rob a genuine minority from a genuine disadvantaged background of their chance.
Warren deliberately misrepresented herself as a Native American, solely for career advancement, and then abandoned her fake identity once she got tenure at Harvard. There was another woman who was an actual minority that had a teaching appointment at Harvard, but Warren beat her out, using her false claims of minority heritage to overcome her competition's actual minority status.
Trump competes on his own.There what's funny about these arguments. They're basically saying, "your candidate has some flaws, she's very school marmy, and thinks she knows everything."David Naas • 7 hours ago"Therefore, OBVIOUSLY people have no choice but to instead vote for the raging imbecile, the pathologically lying, corrupt to his core, racist, morally bankrupt, sexist imbecile with the literal temperament of of an emotionally troubled 10 year old."
Lol, and they're serious!
What unpleasant memories Mister Davis has elicited - - - i once had a schoolmarm like that. (Shudder)Night King • 7 hours agoIt is, however, disturbing that Davis has almost captured the style of Trumptweets. The give-away is a shade more literacy and better grammar in Davis' offerings.
But what of the possibility, as suggested above, that Trump loses to Biden or (Generic Democratic candidate)?
As I tell my liberal friends, the country survived eight years of Priapic Bill, eight years of Dubya and Dubyaer, eight years of BHO, and after four years of Trump is yet standing, however drunkenly.
I think, contra many alarmists, the Republic is much stronger than the average pundit or combox warrior gives it credit.
And, who knows? Maybe the outrage pornography we get from Tweeting birdies will grow stale and passe, and people will yearn for more civil discourse? (Not likely, but one never knows.)
I think she's already died and been reincarnated as Greta Thunberg.Liam781 • 7 hours ago • editedSomeone hasn't lived that long in Massachusetts, it would seem. "Massachusettsian" is not the word the writer is looking for. It's "Bay Stater".Michael Warren Davis Liam781 • 6 hours agoLikewise, for Connecticut residents, use "Nutmegger" rather than some (always wrong) derivative of the state name.
I refuse to use "Bay Stater" for the same reason I dislike being called "Mike": nicknames are irritating, unless they're outlandish, like "Beanie" or "Boko" or "Buttigieg."Liam781 Michael Warren Davis • 5 hours ago • editedMassachusetts is a beautiful name -- slow and smooth, like the Merrimack. "Massachusettsian" adds a little skip at the end, as the river crashes into the Atlantic at Newburyport. It's the perfect demonym.
Speaking of, I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life in Massachusetts -- about 10 minutes outside Newburyport, where my great-great-something grandparents lived when the Revolution broke out. I don't know how much further back the family tree goes in Mass., but probably further than yours.
Good luck with that utter nonsense word, then. Bay Stater is not a nickname - it's the longstanding term (and, for some reason, the Massachusetts General Court also blessed it legislatively), from long before my folk lived in New England since the mid-19th century (Connecticut and Massachusetts - hence my reference to Nutmeggers, as my parents made quite clear to us that there were no such things as Connecticutters or Massachusetters or the like and not to go around sounding like fools using the like.)https://malegislature.gov/L...
Of course, I'd like to recover the old usage of the Eastern States to refer to New England. Right now, its sole prominent residue is the Big E in Springfield....
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Jan 19, 2020 | off-guardian.org
Let's be clear, there is a difference between substituting geopolitical power calculations for a universal perspective on the good of humanity, and, on the other hand, recognizing that the existing layout of the world has to be taken into account in attempts to open up a true politics. (My larger perspective on the problem of "opening" is presented in the long essay, "The Fourth Hypothesis," at counterpunch.org.)
Personally, I find the geopolitical analyses of George Friedman very much worthwhile to consider, especially when he is looking at things long-range, as in his books The Next 100 Years and The Next Decade. The latter was published at the beginning of 2012, and so we are coming to the close of the ten-year period that Friedman discusses.
One of the major arguments that Friedman makes in The Next Decade is that the United States will have to reach some sort of accommodation with Iran and its regional ambitions. The key to this, Friedman argues, is to bring about some kind of balance of power again, such as existed before Iraq was torn apart.
This is the key in general to continued U.S. hegemony in the world, in Friedman's view -- regional balances that keep regional powers tied up and unable to rise on the world stage. (An especially interesting example here is that Friedman says that Poland will be built up as a bulwark between Russia and Germany.)
In the larger global picture, if the U.S. is to find its own balance in the contemporary world, Friedman argues that the seemingly-endless instability in the Middle East is the first and foremost problem that must be solved. Iran is a major problem here, but so is Israel, and Friedman argues that the US must find the path toward "quietly distanc[ing] itself from Israel" (p.6).
This course of action regarding Iran and Israel (and other actors in the Muslim world, including Pakistan and Turkey) is, in Friedman's geopolitical perspective, not so much a matter of supporting U.S. global hegemony as it is recognizing the larger course that the U.S. will be compelled to take.
(As the founder, CEO, and "Chief Intelligence Officer" of Stratfor, Friedman aimed to provide "non-ideological" strategic intelligence. My understanding of "non-ideological" is that the analysis was not formulated to suit the agendas of the two mainstream political parties in the U.S. However, my sense is that Friedman does believe that U.S. global hegemony is on the whole good for the world.)
In his book that came out before The Next Decade (2011), The Next 100 Years (2009), Friedman makes the case that the U.S. will not be seriously challenged globally for decades to come -- in fact, all the way until about 2080!
Just to give a different spin to something I said earlier, and that I've tried to emphasize in my articles since March 2016: questions of mere power are not questions of politics. Geopolitics is not politics, either -- in my terminology, it is "anti-politics."
For my part, I am not interested in supporting U.S. hegemony, not in the present and not in the future, and for the most part not in the past, either.
For the moment, let us simply say that the historical periods of the U.S. that are more supportable -- because they make some contribution, however flawed, to the greater, universal, human project -- are either from before the U.S. entered the road of seeking to compete with other "great powers" on the world stage, or quite apart from this road.
In my view, the end of U.S. global hegemony and, for that matter, the end of any "great nation-state" global hegemony, is a condition sine qua non of a human future that is just and sustainable. So, again, the brilliance that George Friedman often brings to geopolitical analysis is to be understood in terms of a coldly-realistic perspective, not a warmly-normative one.)
Of course, this continued U.S. hegemony depends on certain "wise" courses of action being taken by U.S. leaders (Friedman doesn't really get into the question of what might be behind these leaders), including a "subtle" approach to the aforementioned questions of Israel and Iran.
Obviously, anything associated with Donald Trump is not going to be overly subtle! On the other hand, here we are almost at the end of Friedman's decade, so perhaps the time for subtlety has passed, and the U.S. is compelled to be a bit heavy-handed if there is to be any chance of extricating itself from the endless quagmire.
However, there's a certain fly, a rather large one, in the ointment that seems to have eluded Friedman's calculations: "the rise of China."
It isn't that Friedman avoids the China question, not at all; Friedman argues, however, that by 2020 China will not only not be contending with the United States to have the largest economy in the world, but instead that China will fragment, perhaps even devolve into civil war, because of deep inequalities between the relatively prosperous coastal urban areas, and the rural interior.
Certainly I know from study, and many conversations with people in China, this was a real concern going into the 2010s and in the first half of the decade.
The chapter dealing with all this in The Next 100 Years (Ch. 5) is titled, "China 2020: Paper Tiger," the latter term being one that Chairman Mao used regarding U.S. imperialism. Friedman writes of another "figure like Mao emerg[ing] to close the country off from the outside, [to] equalize the wealth -- or poverty " (p.7).
Being an anti-necessitarian in philosophy, I certainly believe anything can happen in social matters, but it seems as though President Xi Jinping and the current leadership of the Communist Party of China have, at least for the time being, managed to head off fragmentation at the pass, so to speak.
Friedman argued that the "pass" that China especially had to deal with is unsustainable growth rates; but it appears that China has accomplished this, by purposely slowing its economy down.
One of the things that Friedman is especially helpful with, in his larger geopolitical analysis, is understanding the role that naval power plays in sustaining U.S. hegemony. (In global terms, such power is what keeps the neoliberal "free market" running, and this power is far from free.)
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Two of the best supporters of Trump's stated agenda are Tucker Carlson and Steve Hilton. Neither of them pull any punches on this issue when it comes to Republicans, and both of them go some distance beyond Trump in stating an explicitly anti-war agenda.
They perhaps do not entirely fit the mold of leftist anti-imperialism as it existed from the 1890s through the Sixties (as in the political decade, perhaps 1964-1974 or so) and 1970s, but they do in fact fit this mold vastly better than almost any major figure of the Democratic Party, with the possible exceptions of Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang. (But none of them has gone as far as Trump on this question!)
Certainly Elizabeth Warren is no exception, and at the moment of this writing she has made the crucial turn toward sticking the knife back into Bernie's back. That is her job, in my view, and part of it is to seem close to Bernie's positions (whatever their defects, which I'll discuss elsewhere), at least the ones that are more directly "economic," while winking at the ruling class.
There are a few things Carlson and Hilton say on the Iran situation and the Middle East in general that I don't agree with. But in the main I think both are right on where these issues are concerned.
As I've quoted Carlson a number of times previously, and as I also want to put forward Hilton as an important voice for a politics subservient to neither the liberal nor the conservative establishments, here let me quote what Hilton said in the midst of the Iran crisis, on January 5, 2020:
The best thing America can do to put the Middle East on a path that leads to more democracy, less terrorism, human rights and economic growth is to get the hell out of there while showing an absolute crystal clear determination to defend American interests with force whenever they are threatened.That doesn't mean not doing anything, it means intervening only in ways that help America.
It means responding only to attacks on Americans disproportionately as a deterrent, just as we saw this week and it means finally accepting that it's not our job to fix the Middle East from afar.
The only part of this I take exception to is the "intervening only in ways that help America"-bit -- that opens the door to exactly the kinds of problems that Hilton wants the U.S. to avoid, besides the (to me, more important) fact that it is just morally wrong to think it is acceptable to intervene if it is in one's "interests."
My guess is that Hilton thinks that there is some built-in utilitarian or pragmatic calculus that means the morally-problematic interventions will not occur. I do not see where this has ever worked, but more importantly, this is where philosophy is important, theoretical work and abstract thinking are important.
It used to be that the Left was pretty good at this sort of thing, and there were some thoughtful conservatives who weren't bad, either. (A decent number of the latter, significantly, come from the Catholic intellectual tradition.) Now there are still a few of the latter, and there are ordinary people who are "thoughtful conservatives" in their "unschooled way" -- which is often better! -- but the Left has sold its intellectual soul along with its political soul.
That's a story for elsewhere (I have told parts of it in previous articles in this series); the point here is that the utilitarianism and "pragmatism" of merely calculating interests is not nearly going to cut it. (I have partly gone into this here because Hilton also advocates "pragmatism" in his very worthwhile book, Positive Populism -- it is the "affirmative" other side to Tucker Carlson's critical, "negative" expose, Ship of Fools.)
The wonderful philosophical pragmatism of William James is another matter; this is important because James, along with his friend Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), were leading figures of the Anti-Imperialist League back in the 1890s, when the U.S. establishment was beating the drums loudly to get into the race with Europeans for colonies.
They were for never getting "in" -- and of course they were not successful, which is why "get the hell out" is as important as anything people can say today.
What an insane world when the U.S. president says this and the political establishment opposes him, and "progressives" and "the Left" join in with the denunciations!
It has often been argued that the major utilitarian philosophers, from Bentham and Mill to Peter Singer, have implicit principles that go beyond the utilitarian calculus; I agree with this, and I think this is true of Steve Hilton as well.
In this light, allow me to quote a little more from the important statement he made on his Fox News Channel program, "The Next Revolution," on January 5; all of this is stuff I entirely agree with, and that expresses some very good principles:
The West's involvement in the Middle East has been a disaster from the start and finally, with President Trump, America is in a position to bring it to an end. We don't need their oil and we don't need their problems.Finally, we have a U.S. president who gets that and wants to get out. There are no prospects for Middle East peace as long as we are there.
We're never going to defeat the ideology of Islamist terror as long as these countries are basket cases and one of the reasons they are basket cases is that our preposterous foreign policy establishment with monumental arrogance have treated the middle east like some chess game played out in the board rooms in Washington and London.
– [foxnews.com, transcribed by Yael Halon]
So then there is the usual tittering about this and that regarding Carlson and Hilton from liberal and progressive Democrats and leftists who support the Democrats, and it seems to me that there is one major reason why there is this foolish tittering: It is because these liberals and leftists really don't care about, for example, the destruction of Libya, or the murder of Berta Caceres.
Or, maybe they do care, but they have convinced themselves that these things have to swept under the rug in the name of defeating the pure evil of Trump. What this amounts to, in the "nationalist" discourse, is that Trump is some kind of nationalist (as he has said numerous times), perhaps of an "isolationist" sort, while the Democrats are in fact what can be called "nationalists of the neoliberal/neoconservative compact."
My liberal and leftist friends (some of them Maoists and post-Maoists and Trotskyists or some other kinds of Marxists or purported radicals -- feminists or antifa or whatever) just cannot see, it simply appears to be completely beyond the realm of their imaginations, that the latter kind of nationalism is much worse and qualitatively worse than what Trump represents, and it completely lacks the substantial good elements of Trump's agenda.
But hey, don't worry my liberal and leftist friends, it is hard to imagine that Joe Biden's "return to normalcy" won't happen at some point -- it will take not only an immense movement to even have a chance of things working out otherwise, but a movement that likes of which is beyond everyone's imagination at this point -- a movement of a revolutionary politics that remains to be invented, as all real politics are, by the masses.
Liberals and leftists have little to worry about here, they're okay with a Deep State society with a bullshit-democratic veneer and a neoliberal world order; this set-up doesn't really affect them all that much, not negatively at any rate, and the deplorables can just go to hell.
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The Left I grew up with was the Sixties Left, and they used to be a great source of historical memory, and of anti-imperialism, civil rights, and ordinary working-people empowerment.
The current Left, and whatever array of Democratic-Party supporters, have received their marching orders, finally, from commander Pelosi (in reality, something more like a lieutenant), so the two weeks or so of "immense concern" about Iran has given way again to the extraordinarily-important and solemn work of impeachment.
But then, impeachment is about derailing the three main aspects of Trump's agenda, so you see how that works. Indeed, perhaps the way this is working is that Trump did in fact head off, whatever one thinks of the methods, a war with Iran (at this time! – and I do think this is but a temporary respite), or more accurately, a war between Iran and Israel that the U.S. would almost certainly be sucked into immediately.
So, it's back to Plan A for the Democrats and the "Left" that would be laughably absurd if it wasn't so reactionary, to get the neoliberal/ neoconservative endless-war agenda back on track, so that the march toward Iran can continue sooner rather than later. For now, the more spectacular the failure of this impeachment nonsense, the better!
Bill Martin is a philosopher and musician, retired from DePaul University. He is completing a book with the title, "The Trump Clarification: Disruption at the Edge of the System (toward a theory)." His most recent albums are "Raga Chaturanga" (Bill Martin + Zugzwang; Avant-Bass 3) and "Emptiness, Garden: String Quartets nos. 1 and 2 (Ryokucha Bass Guitar Quartet; Avant-Bass 4). He lives in Salina, Kansas, and plays bass guitar with The Radicles.
Dungroanin ,
I have read through finally. And comments too.My opinion is Bill Martin is on the ball except for one personage- Hilton. If he is Camerons Hilton and architect of the Brexit referendum – for which he is rewarded with a 'seat at the table' of the crumbling Empire. The Strafor man too is just as complicit in the Empires wickedness.
But I'll let Bill off with that because he mentioned the Anti-Imperialist Mark Twain – always a joy to be reminded of Americas Dickens.
On Trump – he didn't use the Nuclear codes 10 minutes after getting them as warned by EVERYONE. Nor start a war with RocketMan, or Russia in Syria, or in Ukraine or with the Chinese using the proxy Uighars, or push through with attempted Bay of Pigs in Venezuela or just now Hong Kong. The Wall is not built and the ineffectual ripoff Obamacare version of a NHS is still there.
Judge by deeds not words.Soleimani aside – He may have stopped the drive for war. Trumps direct contact with fellow world leaders HAS largely bypassed the war mongering State Department and also the Trillion dollar tax free Foundations set up last century to deliver the world Empire, that has so abused the American peoples and environment. He probably wasn't able to stop Bolivia.
The appointments of various players were not necessarily in his hands as Assad identified- the modern potus is merely a CEO/Chair of a board of directors who are put into place by the special interests who pour billions, 10's of billions into getting their politicians elected. They determine 'National Interests'. All he can do is accept their appointment and give them enough rope to hang themselves – which most have done!
These are that fight clubs rules.On the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – after 20 full years of working towards cohesion- they have succeeded. Iran is due to become a full member – once it is free of UN sanctions, which is why Trump was forced into pulling the treaty with them, so that technicality could stop that membership. China is not having it nor is Russia – Putins clear statement re the 'international rules' not being mandatory for them dovetails with the US position of Exceptionality. Checkmate.
As for the Old Robber Baron Banker Pirates idea that they should be allowed a Maritime Empire as consolation- ha ha ha, pull the other one.
The ancient sea trading routes from Africa to China were active for thousands of years before the Europeans turned up and used unequal power to disrupt and pillage at their hearts content.
What made that possible was of course explained in the brilliant Guns, Germs and Steel.
These ancients have ALL these and are equal or advanced in all else including Space, Comms and AI. A navy is not so vital when even nuclear subs are visible from low orbit satellites except in the deepest trenches – not a safe place to hide for months and also pretty crowded with all the other subs trying to hide there. As for Aircraft carrier groups – just build an island! Diego Garcia has a rival.
Double Checkmate.
The Empire is Dead. Long live the Empire.
Dungroanin ,
And this is hilarious about potus turning the tables on the brass who tried to drag him into the 'tank'.'Grab the damn fainting couch. Trump told the assembled military leaders who had presided over a military stalemate in Afghanistan and the rise of ISIS as "losers." Not a one of them had the balls to stand up, tell him to his face he was wrong and offer their resignation. Nope. They preferred to endure such abuse in order to keep their jobs. Pathetic.
This excerpt in the Washington Post tells the reader more about the corruption of the Deep State and their mindset than it does about Trump's so-called mental state. Trump acted no differently in front of these senior officers and diplomats than he did on the campaign trail. He was honest. That is something the liars in Washington cannot stomach. '
Rhys Jaggar ,
I am not an expert on US Constitutional Law, but is there any legal mechanism for a US President to hold a Referendum in the way that the UK held a 'Brexit Referendum' and Scotland held an 'Independence Referendum'?How would a US Referendum in 'Getting the hell out of the Middle East, bringing our boys and girls home before the year is out' play out, I wonder?
That takes the argument away from arch hawks like Bolton et al and puts it firmly in the ambit of Joe Schmo of Main Street, Oshkosh
wardropper ,
Great idea.
Main problem is that most Americans are brought up to think their government is separate from themselves, and should not be seriously criticized.
By "criticized", I mean, taken to task in a way which actually puts them on a playing field where they are confronted by real people.
Shouting insults at the government from the rooftops is simply greeted with indulgent smiles from the guilty elite.Richard Le Sarc ,
George Friedman is a bog standard Zionist, therefore, out of fear, a virulent Sinophobe, because the Zionists will never control China as they do the Western slave regimes. China surpassed the USA as the world' s largest economy in 2014, on the PPP calculus that the CIA,IMF and just about everyone uses. It' s growing three times as fast as the USA, too. The chance of China fragmenting by 2020 is minuscule, certainly far less than that of the USA. The Chinese have almost totally eliminated poverty, and will raise the living standard of all to a ' middle income' by 2049. It is, however, the genocidal policy of the USA, on which it expend billions EVERY year, to do its diabolical worst to attempt to foment and foster such a hideous fate inside China, by supporting vermin like the Hong Kong fascist thugs, the Uighur salafist terrorist butchers, the medieval theocrats of the Dalai clique and separatist movements in Inner Mongolia, ' Manchuria', Taiwan, even Guandong and Guangxi. It takes a real Western thug to look forward to the ghastly suffering that these villainous ambitions would unleash.Antonym ,
In RlS's nut shell: China can annex area but Israel: no way!Dungroanin ,
Which area is China looking to annex?Richard Le Sarc ,
Ant is a pathological Zionist liar, but you can see his loyalty to ' Eretz Yisrael' , ' ..from the Nile to the Euphrates', and ' cleansed' of non-Jews, can' t you.alsdkjf ,
I'm surprised that this author can even remember the counter culture of the 60s given his Trump love.Yet more Trumpism from Off Guardian. One doesn't have to buy into the politics of post DLC corporate owned DNC to know Trump for what he is. A fascist.
It's just amazing this Trump "left". Pathetic.
Antonym ,
Trump .. better than HRC but the guy is totally hypnotized by the level of the New York stock exchanges: even his foreign policy is improvised around that. He simply thinks higher is a proof of better forgetting that 90% of Americans don't own serious quantity of stock and that levels are manipulated by big players and the FED. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/economy/stocks-economy.htmlLook at his dealing with China: tough as much as the US stock market stays benign in the short term. Same for Iran etc.
Sure, he is crippled by Pelosi & the FBI / CIA, but he is also by his own stock dependent mind. Might be the reason he is still alive ???
alsdkjf ,
Trump crippled by the CIA? Trump?I mean the fascist jerk appointed ex CIA torture loving Pompeo to replace swamp creature oil tycoon as Secretary of State, no?
He appointed torture queen within the CIA to become CIA Director, no?
He went to the CIA headquarters on day one of his Administration to lavish praise, no?
He took on ex CIA Director Woolsey as advisor on foreign policy during his campaign, no?
I tell ya that Trump is a real adversary of the CIA!
Gall ,
Roger that. Trump appoints a dominatrix as DCI. Only a masochist or a sadist would Dream of Gina..you know the head of the torture squad under Bush. Otherwise nice girl. PompAss is a total clown but a dangerous one who even makes John Bolton look sane. Now that's scary!This guy is Hilary Clinton in drag. The only thing missing is the evil triumphalist cackle after whacking Soleimani. Maybe it wasn't recorded.
So much for "draining the swamp". The Whitehouse has become an even bigger swamp.
Antonym ,
Forgot about John Brennan ex- CIA head or James Clapper ex-DNI honcho?
John Brennan On 'All Roads With Trump Lead To Putin' | The Last Word | MSNBC
They practically too Trump hostage in his first year.one ,
my take from this article:
There are, among the murderers and assassins in Washington, a couple of characters who appear to have 2% of human DNA.
They author may confirm.two ,
"israel is right in the cen "
sorry, the muderous regime israel has repeatedly proven, it's never never right . please avoid this usage.three ,
There are 53 or 54 'I's in the article, including his partner's Is. The author may confirm.Dungroanin ,
Phew!That is a lot of words mate. Fingers must be sore. I won't comment more until trying to re-read again except quote this:
"Being an anti-necessitarian in philosophy,.."
I must say i had a wtf moment at that point see ya later.
paul ,
The idea that Trump's recent actions in the Middle East were part of some incredibly cunning plan to avoid war with Iran, strikes me as somewhat implausible, to put it (very) charitably.Even Hitler didn't want war. He wanted to achieve his objectives without fighting. When that didn't work, war was Plan B. Trump probably has very little actual control over foreign policy. He is surrounded by people who have been plotting and scheming against him from long before he was elected. He heads a chaotic and dysfunctional administration of billionaires, chancers, grifters, conmen, superannuated generals, religious nut jobs, swamp creatures, halfwits and outright criminals, lurching from one crisis and one fiasco to the next. Some of these people like Bolton were foisted upon him by Adelson and various other backers and wire pullers, but that is not to absolve Trump of personal responsibility.
Competing agencies which are a law unto themselves have been free to pursue their own turf wars at the expense of anything remotely resembling a rational and coherent strategy. So have quite low level bureaucrats, formulating and implementing their own policies with little regard for the White House. In Syria, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department went their own way, each supporting competing and mutually antagonistic factions and terrorist groups. Agreements that were reached with Russia over Syria, for example, were deliberately sabotaged by Ashton Carter in 24 hours. Likewise, Bolton did everything he could to wreck Trump's delicate negotiations with N. Korea.
paul ,
Seen in this light, US policy (or the absence of any coherent policy) is more understandable. What passes for US leadership is the worst in its history, even given a very low bar. Arrogant, venal, corrupt, delusional, irredeemably ignorant, and ideologically driven. The only positive thing that can be said is that the alternative (Clinton) would probably have been even worse, if that is possible.That may also be the key to understanding the current situation. For all his pandering to Israel, Trump is more of a self serving unprincipled opportunist than a true Neocon/ Zionist believer in the mould of Pence, Bolton and Pompeo. For that reason he is not trusted by the Zionist Power Elite. He is too much of a loose cannon. They will take all his Gives, like Jerusalem and the JCPOA, but without any gratitude.
It has taken them a century of plotting, scheming and manoeuvring to achieve their political, financial, and media stranglehold over the US. but America is a wasting asset and they are under time pressure. It is visibly declining and losing its influence. And the parasite will find it difficult to find a similar host. Who else is going to give Israel billions a year in tribute, unlimited free weaponry and diplomatic cover? Russia? Are Chinese troops "happy to die for Israel" asUS ones are (according to their general)?
paul ,
And they are way behind schedule. Assad was supposed to be dead by now, and Syria another defenceless failed state, broken up into feuding little cantons, with Israel expanding into the south of the country. The main event, the war with Iran, should have started lond ago.That is the reason for the impeachment circus. This is not intended to be resolved one way or the other. It is intended to drag on indefinitely, for months and years, to distract and weaken Trump and make it possible to extract what they want. One of the reasons Trump agreed to the murder of Soleimani and his Iraqi opposite number was to appease some Republican senators like Graham whose support is essential to survive impeachment. They were the ones who wanted it, along with Bolton and Netanyahu.
paul ,
It is instructive that all the main players in the impeachment circus are Jews, under Sanhedrin Chief Priests Schiff and Nadler, apart from a few token goys thrown in to make up the numbers. That even goes for those defending Trump.Richard Le Sarc ,
Don' t forget that Lebanon up to the Litani is the patrimony of the Jewish tribes of Asher and Naphtali, and, as Smotrich, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, said on Israeli TV a few years ago, ' Damascus belongs to the Jews'.bevin ,
" China will fragment, perhaps even devolve into civil war, because of deep inequalities between the relatively prosperous coastal urban areas, and the rural interior."This is not Bill, but Bill's mate the Stratcor geopolitical theorist for hire.
What is happening in the world is that the only empire the globe, as a whole, has ever seen- the pirate kingdom that the Dutch, then the British and finally the US, leveraged out of the plunder and conquest of America -the maritime empire, of sea routes and navies is under challenge by a revival of the Eurasian proto-empires that preceded it and drove its merchants and princes on the Atlantic coast, to sea.
We know who the neo-liberals are the current iteration of the gloomy philosophies of the Scots Enlightenment, (Cobbett's 'Scotch Feelosophy') utilitarianism in its crudest form and the principles of necessary inequalities, from the Austrian School back to the various crude racisms which became characteristic of the C19th.
The neo-cons are the latest expression of the maritime powers' fear of Eurasia and its interior lines of communication. Besides which the importance of navies and of maritime agility crumble.
Bill mentions that China has not got much of a navy. I'm not so sure about that, but isn't it becoming clear that navies-except to shipyards, prostitutes and arms contractors- are no longer of sovereign importance? There must be missile commanders in China drooling over the prospect of catching a US Fleet in all its glory within 500 miles of the mainland. Not to mention on the east coast of the Persian Gulf.
The neo-cons are the last in a long line of strategists, ideologists and, for the most part, mercenary publicists defying the logic of Halford Mackinder's geo-strategy for a lot more than a penny a line. And what they urge, is all that they can without crossing the line from deceitfulness to complete dishonesty: chaos and destabilisation within Eurasia, surrounding Russia, subverting Sinkiang and Tibet, employing sectarian guerrillas, fabricating nationalists and nationalisms.. recreate the land piracy, the raiding and the ethnic explosions that drove trade from the land to the sea and crippled the Qing empire.
The clash is between war, necessary to the Maritime Empire and Peace, vital to the consolidation and flowering of Eurasia.As to Israel, and perhaps we can go into this later: it looms much larger in the US imagination (and the imaginations the 'west' borrows from the US) than anywhere else. It is a tiny sliver of a country. Far from being an elephant in any room, it is simply a highly perfumed lapdog which also serves as its master's ventriloquist's dummy. Its danger lies in the fact that after decades of neglect by its idiotic self indulgent masters, it has become an openly fascist regime, which was definitely not meant to happen, and, misled by its own exotic theories of race, has come to believe that it can do what it wants. It can't-and this is one reason why Bill misjudges the reasoning behind the Soleimani killing- but it likes to act, or rather threaten to act, as if it could.
(By the way-note to morons across the web-Bill's partner quotes Adorno and writes about him too: cue rants about Cultural Marxism.)
Hugh O'Neill ,
Thanks, Bevin. The article was so long, I had quite forgotten that he laid too much emphasis on the Stratcor Unspeakable. Clever he may be, but not much use without a moral compass. Talking of geo-strategists, you will doubtless be aware of the work of A.T. Mahan whose blueprint for acquisition of inspired Teddy Roosevelt and leaders throughout Europe, Russia, Japan.Richard Le Sarc ,
Friedman is a snake oil peddler. He tells the ruling psychopaths what they want to hear, like ' China crumbling', their favourite wet-dream.bevin ,
I agree about Mahan's importance. He understood what lay behind the Empire on which the sun never set but he had enough brains to have been able to realise that current conditions make those fleets obsolete. In fact the Germans in the last War realised that too- their strategy was Eurasian, it broke down over the small matter of devouring the USSR. The expiry date on the tin of Empire has been obvious for a long time- there is simply too much money to be made by ignoring it.
Russia has always been the problem, either real (very occasionally) or latent for the Dutch/British/US Empire because it is just so clear that the quickest and most efficient communications between Shanghai and Lisbon do not go through the Straits of Malacca, the Suez Canal, or round the cape . Russia never had to do a thing to earn the enmity of the Empire, simply existing was a challenge. And that remains the case- for centuries the Empire denounced the Russians because of the Autocracy, then it was the anarchism of the Bolsheviks, then it was the autocracy again, this time featuring Stalin, then it was the chaos of the oligarchs and now we are back with the Tsar/Stalin Putin.Hugh O'Neill ,
Phenomenal diagnosis, Bevin. However, one suspects that there is still too much profit to be made by the MIC in pursuing useless strategies. I imagine Mahan turning in his grave in his final geo-strategic twist.Richard Le Sarc ,
Yes-Zionist hubris will get Israel into a whole world of sorrow.MASTER OF UNIVE ,
More USA Deep State conspiracy theorizing which makes the author American paternalism posing as authorship that is revenue neutral when it ain't.Any article with mention of mother-'Tucker' Carlson is one that is pure propagandistic tripe in the extreme. Off-G is a UK blog yet this Americanism & worn out aged propaganda still prevails in the minds of US centric myopics writ large across all states in the disunity equally divided from cities to rural towns all.
MOU
johny conspiranoid ,
"More USA Deep State conspiracy theorizing which makes the author American paternalism posing as authorship that is revenue neutral when it ain'"
Is this even a sentence?MASTER OF UNIVE ,
It was a sentence when I was smoking marijuana yesterday, Johnny C. Today it is still a sentence IMHO, but you transcribed it incorrectly, and forgot the end of the sentence.NOTE: When I smoke marijuana I am allowed to write uncoordinated sentences. These are the rules in CANADA. If you don't like it write to your local politician and complain bitterly.
MOU
Charlotte Russe ,
Bush, Obama, and Clinton are despicable. In fact, they're particularly disgusting, inasmuch, as they were much more "cognizant" than Trump of how their actions would lead to very specific insidious consequences. In addition, they were more able to cleverly conceal their malevolent deeds from the public. And that's why Trump is now sitting in the Oval Office–he won because of public disgust for lying politicians.However, Trump is "dangerous" because he's a "misinformed idiot," and as such is extremely malleable. Of course, ignorance is no excuse when the future of humanity is on the line
In any event, Trump is often not aware of the outcome of his actions. And when you're surrounded and misinformed by warmongering neoconservative nutcases, especially ones who donated to your campaign chances are you'll do stupid things. And that's what they're counting on.
alsdkfj ,
Trump is some virtuous example of a truth teller? Trump?The biggest liar to every occupy the White House and that is saying a lot.
Swamp Monster fascist Trump. So much to love, right?
He could murder one of your friends and you'd still apologize for him, is my guess.
Hugh O'Neill ,
It was a long read, but I got there. In essence, I agreed with 99%, but I hesitate to share too much praise for Trump's qualities as a Human Being – though he may be marginally more Human than the entire US body politic. I was walking our new puppy yesterday when he did his usual attempt to leap all over other walkers. I pleaded their forgiveness and explained that his big heart was in inverse proportion to his small brain. It occurred to me later that the opposite would be pure evil i.e. a small heart but big brain. Capitalism as is now infects the Human Experiment, has reduced both brains and hearts: propagandists believe their own lies, and too few trust their own instincts and innate compassion, ground down by the relentless distractions of lies and 'entertainment' (at least the Romas gave you free bread!).
I get the impression that Trump's world view hasn't altered much since he was about 11 years old. I do not intend to insult all eleven-year-olds, but his naivety is not a redeeming feature of his spoilt brat bully personality. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker every John Wayne cowboy movie and thinks the world can be divided into good guys and bad guys depending on what colour hat they wear. In the days of Black & White TV, it was either black or white. The world seemed so much simpler aged 11 .(1966).Dungroanin ,
Yet I have yet to see one photo of Trump with a gun or in uniform.MASTER OF UNIVE ,
The Duck learned to dress appropriately for business, I'll give him that. As a New York Real Estate scion you will never see him dress otherwise. Protocol in business is a contemporary business suit. No other manner of dress is allowed for the executive class in North America or UK.
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Jan 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com
Cassiodorus on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 11:44am Alexandra Petri tells us:
In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates.
Of course, this is a parody of the NYT's endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren , trying to encourage the "who cares about policy we want an identity-politics win" vote. Petri's funniest moment is:
One of two things is wrong with America: Either the entire system is broken or is on the verge of breaking, and we need someone to bring about radical, structural change, or -- we don't need that at all! Which is it? Who can say? Certainly not me, and that is why I am telling you now which candidate to vote for.
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Jan 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
...
in what the paper described as a "significant break with convention", the members of its editorial board have selected not one, but two candidates - both of them women.Its chosen candidates are: Elizabeth Warren, the Republican-turned-progressive who for years posed as a Native American to game America's system of affirmative action - and Amy Klobuchar, the midwestern senator from the great state of Minneapolis with a reputation for being an unhinged dragon-lady boss.
That the NYT selected the two remaining women among the top tier of contenders is hardly a surprise: This is, after all, the same newspaper that kicked off #MeToo by dropping the first expose about Harvey Weinstein's history of abusing, harassing and assaulting women just days before the New Yorker followed up with the first piece from Ronan Farrow.
...After all, if the editors went ahead with their true No. 1 choice, Klobuchar, a candidate who has very little chance of actually capturing the nomination, they would look foolish.
DeePeePDX , 2 hours ago link
Griffin , 2 hours ago linkNYT is like that ex you dumped that won't stop trying to get your attention with increasingly desperate and pathetic acts.
Someone Else , 2 hours ago linkWarren is a much better candidate than Biden is in my view.
Warren seems to get into trouble sometimes for all kinds of reasons like most people do, but the problems are usually trivial, more silly than dangerous. There is tendency in her to stick to her guns even when she does not know what she is doing.
When i run into something unexpected or something that seems to be something i don't understand, i usually backtrack and look at the problem from some distance to see what happened and why before trying to correct or fix the problem, rather than just doing something.
Its not a perfect plan, but it seems to work most of the time.
TheManj , 3 hours ago linkThe tennis shoe I threw away last week is a better candidate than Biden. So that's not saying much.
John Hansen , 3 hours ago linkNYT remains a joke. Their endorsement is straight up virtue-signalling.
Here's some reality: Warren's latest antics have cemented her image as dishonest and high-strung. Knoblocker has no charisma and remains practically unknown.
pitz , 4 hours ago linkWhy are foreign ownedNew York Times allowed to meddle in the election?
Where is the investigation?
spam filter , 4 hours ago linkI've personally sat down and talked with Klobuchar. Not a lot of depth of intelligence in her, that's for sure, easily manipulated by lobbyists. Warren, at least, knows what the problem is, although she might have swallowed the proverbial Democratic party "kool aid".
SheHunter , 5 hours ago linkWarren is the deep state establishment pick. If you must vote Dem, pick someone that isn't, or one the establishment seems to work against. Better yet, vote Trump, safe bet on gun rights, freedoms.
Here's the link. It is a gd editorial.
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Jan 19, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
The media cannot forgive Bernie Sanders for refusing to "bend the knee" to Elizabeth Warren regarding her recounting of a now infamous December 2018 meeting between the two, in which the Vermont senator allegedly said a woman could not be elected president.
Furthermore, if you don't agree with Sen. Warren's version of events, or if you mention her history of "embellishing," you are a sexist and a misogynist just like Sanders. So fall in line with the establishment narrative, quick.
That is the clear takeaway after the media took off its fig leaf of journalistic impartiality at the seventh Democrat presidential debate in Iowa Tuesday.
Never mind that women make up about 70 percent of Sanders' campaign leadership team, or that young women actually make up a bigger share of Sanders's base than young men do .
During the debate, CNN moderator Abby Phillips had this exchange:
Phillips: You're saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman couldn't win the election?
Bernie: Correct.
Phillips: Senator Warren, what did you think when Sanders said a woman couldn't win the election?
Warren: I disagreed. Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie.
This is "when did you stop beating your wife" level debate questioning from CNN. The question is premised around an anonymously-sourced story CNN reported Monday describing a meeting between Sanders and Warren in December 2018, where the two agreed to a non-aggression pact of sorts. For the sake of the progressive movement, they reportedly agreed they would not attack each other during the campaign:
They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.
In a statement to CNN, Sanders said before the debate that's not what happened at all.
"It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win," said Sanders, chalking up the story to "staff who weren't in the room lying about what happened."
"I thought a woman could win; he disagreed," said Warren in a statement.
Cue CNN's gladiatorial presidential debates.
Eager to strike all the right girl-power notes for the night, Phillips followed up by asking Sen. Amy Klobuchar the substantive policy question, "what do you say to people who say that a woman can't win this election?" and Warren earned cheers for a line about women successfully winning elections.
"Look at the men on this stage," Warren said. "Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they've been in are the women: Amy (Klobuchar) and me."
After the debate, media commentators roundly declared Warren the winner, and pundits attacked the very idea of questioning the veracity of Warren's account.
Here's CNN, just after the debate:
Chris Cillizza, CNN politics reporter: Sanders, look, a lot of it is personal preference. I didn't think his answer vis-a-vis Elizabeth Warren and what was said in that conversation was particularly good. He was largely dismissive. "Well, I didn't say it. Everyone knows I didn't say it, we don't need to talk about it."
Jess McIntosh, CNN political commentator: And I think what Bernie forgot was that this isn't a he-said-she-said story. This is a reported-out story that CNN was part of breaking. So to have him just flat out say "no," I think, wasn't nearly enough to address that for the women watching.
Joe Lockhart, CNN political commentator: And I can't imagine any woman watching last night and saying, I believe Bernie. I think people believe Elizabeth.
Van Jones, CNN political commentator: This was Elizabeth Warren's night. She needed to do something and there was a banana peel sitting out there for Bernie to step on when it came to his comments about women. I think Bernie stepped on it and slid around. She knocked that moment out of the park.
But isn't this story the literal definition of a he-said, she-said story?
The accusation may have appeared in a "reported-out story," but these are its sources:
"The description of that meeting [between Sanders and Warren in December 2018] is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting."
Is it sexist to question why this story would come out on the eve of the debate -- after months of the two candidates getting along as they had promised to do, when Sanders pulls ahead of Warren in polling ?
If CNN were impartial, they would have mentioned the sourcing and timing of the story, and Warren's fraught history with the truth. Warren has shown she is willing to tell lies in order to get a job she wants, like when she claimed to have Native American blood. She has also claimed she go fired from her teaching job for being pregnant, even when records contradict that. She's said her children went to public schools, not private ones, even though that's not true either.
In addition to Warren's tenuous relationship with the truth, there also happens to be video from the 1980s where Sanders says a woman could be president:
1988, @BernieSanders , backing Jackson:"The real issue is not whether you're black or white, whether you're a woman or a man *in my view, a woman could be elected POTUS* The real issue is are you on the side of workers & poor ppl, or are you on the side of big money &corporations?" pic.twitter.com/VHmfzvyJdy
-- Every nimble plane is a policy failure. (@KindAndUnblind) January 13, 2020
Yet, you wouldn't know any of that, listening to the coverage of the debate, where commentators waxed poetic about Warren's "win" and how any attacks on her predilection for lying were misogyny itself.
Over on Sirius XM POTUS channel Tuesday, an executive producer on Chris Cuomo's show (Chris Cillizza filling in) said that the suggestion from Sanders surrogates that Warren's staff knows she is prone to "embellish" things is "a misogynistic thing to put out there like, 'oh well, look at the quaint housewife, she is prone to embellishment.'"
The New York Times also embraced the questionable sexism premise, writing that in"a conflict heavily focused on which candidate is telling the truth, Ms. Warren faces a real risk: Several studies have shown that voters punish women more harshly than men for real or perceived dishonesty If voters conclude that Ms. Warren is lying, it is most likely to hurt her more than it will hurt Mr. Sanders if voters conclude that he is lying."
Over at Vox:
The over-the-top language -- likening criticism of an opponent to a knife in the back -- was familiar. When powerful men have been accused of sexual misconduct in recent years, they and others have often complained that they've been "killed" or that their "lives are over" The situation between Warren and Sanders is very different from those that have arisen as part of the Me Too movement. But the exaggerated language around a woman's decision to speak out is strikingly similar.
This sort of language is an insult to all women who have had to deal with sexism and misogyny, both in the workplace and in society, and this need to glom on to any aggrieved group, no matter how ill-fitting, is getting really stale.
Meanwhile, former Hillary Clinton and Obama Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri tweeted, "I just rewatched the footage from last night and found it odd that Sanders never says 'a woman could beat Trump.' His formulation is he believes a 'woman could be president.' It's only when he speaks about his own abilities that he talks about what it takes to 'beat Trump.'"
This is the old sexist standby: "I'd vote for a woman, just not that woman."
What is it that these people want, for Sanders to endorse his opponent, simply because she is female? Isn't that the very definition of sexism? By virtue of the fact that Sanders is still in this race, he obviously thinks he can do a better job as president than Warren. There isn't going to be another presidential race against Trump, but Palmieri still essentially wants Sanders to say, in a five-way race three weeks before the Iowa caucus, "Warren can beat Trump in November."
The question here should be whether this is a person that we can trust, not whether the candidate is male or female. Does this person have a history of being honest, or do they have a history of lying?
No wonder Sanders was complaining about liberals' obsession with identity politics . As an elderly, Jewish socialist, he might be an endangered species, but he's one minority group that intersectional politics has no use for.
Osse a vote for liz • a day ago
What are you talking about? If you want to know what Sanders says on this issue, rad his interview with the NYT which was conducted before this cynical hit job occurred. He says many voters are misogynistic, but not that a woman can't win.AGPhillbin Osse • a day agoI think both were telling the truth in that Warren probably took it to mean a woman can't win, but her campaign cynically released thi story over a year later because she was slipping in tge pollls behind Bernie.
That's ridiculously generous of you, at least towards Warren. She knows perfectly well his position on the possibility of a woman president, and women running for office generally. she knows he campaigned vigorously for HRC after the nomination, and she knows that Sanders knows that HRC took the popular vote by over 3 million votes, so he obviously knows that it is highly possible for a woman to win the presidency. This is simply a bald-faced lie on Warren's part, but she has gained nothing electorally for this desperate smear. Sanders not only had a record fundraising day after this surfaced, but at least one poll has him up 2 points in Iowa, where he was already in the lead, with Warren stuck at 12%.trailhiker • 2 days agoSix corporations own something like 90% of the media now.Great CoB • 2 days ago
And CNN is part of the corporate-media-complex.
So not too much of a surprise that they are going after Sanders.
The billionaires are worried he might win, so in a way, this is a good
sign.The 24 hour news channels depend on Trump to bring in the outrage required to keep up their viewing figures. So it makes sense that they should help give him a democrat opponent he can't lose against, like Elizabeth Warren.𝙆𝙧𝙖𝙯𝙮 𝙐𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙚 • 2 days agoWhile it should be fairly obvious to most that Bernie Sanders political rivals are trying everything they can to get ahead of him, it's also true that the DNC and the Main Stream Media, are also trying to trash Bernie in an attempt to take him out as a candidate. The DNC and the MSM did the same thing the last time he attempted to win the nomination, and it appears they are doing so now.BigShot • 2 days agoThe corporate MSM machine should be careful. Another candidate they trashed during the last election cycle, and ever since, became the President. It seems some voters have tied the corporate MSM together with the D.C. establishment, and voters that want an outsider to lead them may just see the MSM's attempts to denigrate a candidate as a ringing endorsement for the outsider.
As a side note, I find it humorous that the MSM attempts to diminish Bernie's supporters as zealots and too extreme to be taken seriously... I thought that political candidates actually worked to gain the support of enthusiastic and motivated supporters? Or, is that just for the candidates that are acceptable to the Main Stream Media and the political Parties?
Voted for Trump in great part because Hillary Clinton was such a liar. Now he turned out to be an even bigger liar than she was. It sure would be nice to have a candidate who didn't lie so much, but now I don't know whether that would be Sanders or Warren.Connecticut Farmer FND • a day agoStrictly speaking, socialism was an abject failure which ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain, There is an unfortunate tendency to conflate "socialism" with what is called the "welfare state." The United States is a welfare state but can hardly be mistaken for a socialist state.Gutbomb Connecticut Farmer • a day agoI think I see it mostly the same way you do, but with semantic differences. I would argue that communism - the totalitarian version of socialism - was the abject failure. Any first world modern state is a blend of market-based economies and socialism. The question is always which exchanges are best left to market forces and which are best managed from above. And then, how much management to provide. I caution against seeing socialism vs capitalism as some binary switch to flip.former-vet Gutbomb • a day agoSmartest statement I've seen in years.cka2nd Gutbomb • a day agoAnd the fact is that many of these welfare states were implemented by self-declared socialists, including many parties that were members of the Socialist, or Second, International.Connecticut Farmer Gutbomb • 7 hours agoUnfortunately, many of these socialist and labor parties hopped on the neo-liberal train in the 1980's, and are today deathly afraid of their own Bernie Sanders (see Corbyn, Jeremy), and even more afraid of scaring off international finance and the German Central Bank.
Point taken. Perhaps "radical socialism" would have been more accurate. Your description of the modern state as a "blend" is spot-on. An economics professor I once had called ours a "mixed economy", which was a phrase that has always stuck in my mind.Osse FND • a day agoSubstantively Bernie's policies are social democratic and consistent with those of the Scandinavian countries.cka2nd EdMan • 7 hours agoSocial democratic and labor parties around the world turned neo-liberal in the 1980's, including the Scandinavian ones. They've been helping to rip up the "social contract" between Capital and Labor, and the social welfare state, ever since, as well as reversing previous nationalizations and launching privatization. This phenomenon has included Scandinavia, which is why the parties there are so sensitive to all this talk in the U.S. about them being models of "socialism."AGPhillbin FND • a day agoFact is, all non-Marxist "socialist" countries are market based, and are in fact capitalist at the economic base. When did any Scandinavian "socialist" country ever expropriate any major corporations?cka2nd AGPhillbin • a day agoYou might actually want to do a bit of research on that point. Going back 60, 70 or 80 years, there might be some nationalizations of railroads, utilities, energy companies and other major industries not involved in the actual manufacturing of goods in Scandinavia. Great Britain certainly saw such nationalizations, although revolutionary leftists sometimes dismissed them as "lemon socialism" because the capitalist class was fobbing off money-losing or capital-intensive sectors of the economy on the government, in order to concentrate on more profitable enterprises.
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Jan 19, 2020 | lessenberryink.com
She may, especially if Bernie Sanders falters, win the nomination in Milwaukee next July.
But here's something you might consider:
Once upon a time, there was a liberal Democratic Senator from Massachusetts who won the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary easily, and then swept to the nomination.
His opponent was a largely unpopular Republican president who had deeply divided the country. Democrats thought they could smell victory. On Election Day, their candidate did sweep the northeast and the Pacific west. But except for a few states around Chicago, he lost everything else -- and the presidential election.
His name was John Kerry, and that was 2004.
Once upon another time, there was a Democratic candidate from Massachusetts who made a better-than-expected showing in Iowa, swept New Hampshire, and breezed to the nomination.
By summer, he was 17 points ahead in the polls, and the race looked about over. But then the Republican spin doctors went to work on his record, and his campaign went into a tailspin. In the end, he lost 40 states. His name was Michael Dukakis, and that was 1988.
AdvertisementNow, it is a new century, and one of the front-running candidates for the Democratic nomination is Ms. Warren, another liberal senator from, yes, Massachusetts who is leading in some polls in early key states. Every election is different, of course.
The political landscape isn't the same as it was in 1988 or even 2004. But it would be hard to blame any Democrat who looks at this and asks themselves – haven't we seen this show before?
Doesn't it have an unhappy ending?
This analysis could be faulty. No two campaigns are the same, and most people are still not paying a lot of attention.
To be sure, nobody like Donald Trump has ever been in the White House, and given his negative approval ratings and other obvious weaknesses, an economic downturn could possibly doom his reelection no matter who the Democrats run.
David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, is no fan of Warren's – but thinks she may win because by that time, the nation will realize they have to get rid of Trump, no matter what.
Incidentally, he also thinks it would be the duty of any thinking American to support her if she and Trump are the nominees.
But a New York Times /Siena College poll released Nov. 5 indicates that nominating Elizabeth Warren could be the biggest gift the Democrats could give President Trump. Their survey showed former Vice President Joe Biden beating Trump in virtually every swing state, except for North Carolina.
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont led the President narrowly in the three states that decided the last election, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But Warren trailed in every swing state except Arizona.
Polls are notoriously unreliable, especially this early in any election cycle, and a Washington Post-ABC News poll the same day showed Warren with a 55 to 40 percent lead over Trump.
But even that poll showed the more moderate Biden doing better. The New York Times survey found that many voters just plain did not like Warren, some because they did not like her "Medicare for all," health insurance plan; others because they disliked her personality or speaking style.
Some said they felt like she was lecturing them; others, like Elysha Savarese, a 26-year-old Floridian, said "I just don't feel like she's a genuine candidate. I find her body language to be very off-putting. She's very cold basically a Hillary Clinton clone."
That may be unfair, and it is clear from Warren rallies that many women and men adore her.
There are also a few older Democrats who note that John F. Kennedy was a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, and he was elected. That is true – but it was also six decades ago.
Kennedy, who was perceived as a middle-of-the-road moderate, could count on states like Louisiana and Arkansas and Georgia that no Democrat – certainly not one on the left – has much if any hope of winning today. Additionally, the playing field is different.
Voting strength and electoral votes have shifted dramatically from the Northeast, which was and is JFK and Warren's base, to the South and West. New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had a combined 93 electoral votes in 1960. They have a mere 60 today.
Florida, which President Kennedy, (like Hillary Clinton) narrowly lost, had 10 electoral votes in 1960; it has 29 today. Geography has become less favorable to a Massachusetts Democrat. The day after Paul Tsongas won the 1992 Democratic primary, the legendary Texas Gov. Ann Richards, a often irreverent Democrat, dryly told a friend of mine, "So they want to give us another liberal from Massachusetts, and this one has a lisp."
Democrats did not, however, nominate Tsongas, but instead chose Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas who was perceived as a moderate. That fall, he won.
History does not always repeat itself. But it does, sometimes, provide signposts for the future.
(Editor's Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
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Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
c1ue , Jan 18 2020 17:57 utc | 153
@psychedelicatessen #117
You are making a number of assumptions which I don't necessarily agree with.
1) That Sanders and Warren are on the same "side" and are viewed the same by the "establishment". They clearly are not. Warren is the fallback should Sanders not be beaten by Biden. Warren is not a real progressive.
2) Trump vs. Sanders - again, depends on which part of the deep state. It is an error to assume the deep state is any more monolithic than anything else. The most credible breakdown I've seen is that the "deep state" is really 3 parts: the corporates who are happy with Trump, the intel agencies who are not, and the military which was unhappy originally but is now ok since they've come out ahead of the intel agencies and still have representation at the highest levels.
Looking at these same 3 with Sanders: the corporates would/are not happy. The intel agencies are fine with Sanders and so is the military (F35, baby!). So it isn't clear at all the "deep state" overall cares about/hates one more than the other - the constituent groups simply have different goals.
3) Control over petro-dollar dominance. Frankly, I don't see how Trump or Sanders matters there. The tactical plays are very clear: keep the Saudis happy so they won't accede to China wanting to buy Saudi oil in RMB, because the Saudis don't have any other reason to stipulate dollar payments any more.
4) Economic collapse: I am curious as to how you think this will happen. Specifically what is the driver?
If it is de-dollarization - that is going to take decades, unless the US has a debt crisis before then. And frankly, I don't see it coming soon because there is simply too much international trade dollar cushion for the US debt accumulation to be a visible problem for quite some time.
If it is domestic collapse not due to de-dollarization - what is the driver? The economy is already no longer a major manufacturing, etc - with helicopter money going to the 1%. As much as the neoliberals hate it, the reality is that the pain Trump inflicts via the trade war ultimately is net positive for domestic production. It takes a while to make an impact, but the trade war and the anti-China machinations have already caused Chinese manufacturers to move production abroad - and to increase in-US production.
Plus there are ways to extend the runway: health care in particular. That's a big, deep and very popular pot of gold which could be attacked, should Trump desire to do so. As far as I can see, he doesn't have any particular fondness or historical partnerships with the health care/pharma industry.
In 2016, HRC received $32.6M from health care (#1 overall) vs. Trump's $4.9M (#5 overall).
source
Compare with defense: Trump and Clinton were about equal (tied for #1 but only $1M or so).
Trump has also pushed through some laws which definitely aren't liked by the health care folks, like the hospital bill transparency law.
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Jan 17, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
To say Elizabeth Warren is a political opportunist is not giving her enough credit. She has taken the struggles, as well as the identities of others (women, school teachers, Native Americans, public school supporters, people who are able to tweet with humor, actual humans) and has weaponized these categories until the meaning of it all is lost.Her tweet about leaving your ghosting boyfriend and getting a dog despite your roommate's objections should have placed her in the pandering hall of fame, and with that should have included a one way trip to some kind of holding cell for the criminally trite.
Her obvious lies (she's not even good at them, shaking and being sketchy with a tweaker-looking-body-vibe-thing when she tries to pull them off) -- well that bit regarding Bernie Sanders has electrified her twitter feed with images of snakes and has even managed to get #RefundWarren trending. At this rate, maybe she can pull in a negative donation for this quarter. What an achievement. The first female candidate to pull that off! Grrrrl Power! Her political instincts are as feeble as her lies -- to have her tell it, she was a selfless public servant most of her career (more like a teacher long enough to mention it, and a corporate lawyer as the subsequent defining profession). Her kids only went to public schools (umm no), she is of native heritage (shouldn't she have helped a bit at Standing Rock with that 1/16600600606006 ancestry that she is so proud of?) . Oh yes, her father was a janitor (again, what? No). She is but a champion for the veracity challenged. That's true at least.
Warren is that person you can never rely on–the one that has no defining characteristic other than self-elevation. Over the years, if it benefited her, she backed a few seemingly decent causes, but it was never about doing the right thing. It was all political expediency and shape shifting. She was a Republican during so many tumultuous years -- even during the Reagan era that propelled us towards what we are going through now hell, she was a Republican until her late 40s. But now she has reinvented herself as a populist, but won't even talk out against Biden, the man from Creditcardlandia. She's a promiscuous virgin, a carnivorous vegan.
This current trend to take on the struggles of others as your own has been powerful of late. Cops pretend to have coffee cups served to them with pig slurs and Warren puts forth that the very individual who actually urged her to run for president in 2016, changed course and told her women can't win (despite ample evidence that Sanders has a track record that is decidedly feminist). I think she said Bernie offered her a cup of coffee in their meeting that had written on it something like "Women can't win, you're a bitch, how's menopause treating you, and also your hair is dry and brittle." (It was a Starbucks Trenta cup so he could go full on misogynist because there was a lotta space to write on–thanks Starbucks, first a war on Christmas, now a war on Women).
So I'd say this is weaponizing a status and taking the struggles of others to pretend they are your own. Stolen valor, really.
For many of us Sanders is a compromise. The changes needed are massive, but he's the closest thing we've got at this point. The hulking size of our nation and the lack of immediacy to those in power over us lends a situation of creating an infantalized population. This is where we are at now. There should be direct accountability and of course we have nothing of the sort. I suspect far in the future, if humans are to survive in any manner, it will go back to some sort of mutual aid, and direct accountability from those making life and death decisions over others, in short, more of a tribal situation. But right now, in our lifetimes, we are tasked with attempting to keep the planet below 150 degrees, to not bake our children before next week.
We have utter nonsense pouring in from the Warren corporate shills and it is wasting our precious time. The recent CNN debate should render that channel irrelevant at best, a direct threat at the worst. Fox comes in with obvious bias, but the CNNs and MSNBCs slip in behaving as if they are reasonable and neutral, assaulting those of us unlucky enough to have to watch them as captives at dental offices. They most certainly help the Warrens and other corporate shills by providing red herring distractions and pleas for incrementalism. This is akin to only turning up your boiling water that you bath in a degree or two every 5 minutes rather than trying to stop the boil. They care about immediate profits and in truth are terribly stupid. Many of us have been raised to be polite and not utter this about others, especially those in power. We look for reasons and conditions for their behavior and choices, but the stark fact is that a lot of these people are ignorant as fuck and want to remain that way -- little or no intellectual curiosity and full of base greed. And this will kill us all.
The treachery of Warren towards Sanders is most likely from some back room deal with Biden. He probably told her that he needs help against Corn Pop and while sniffing her hair and unwashed face, (I'm not being snarky without reason, she shared her beauty routine with the media since that's so pressing in these days of turmoil) well Biden decided that she would be the one to stroke his leg hairs in the oval office as VP.
They are the golden hairs of a golden white man, he says. This is the way of Washington–lots of white men thinking their leg hair is the best, but her instincts were shit to have taken a deal like this. No way in hell is Biden going to win, even if the DNC does manage to prop him up as their candidate.
Trump will have a field day with him (Biden of the reasonable Republican fable) and if they do debate, the entire country might have a collective intracranial bleed from the batshittery that will be spoken.
Trump will be there, all eyes dilated, snorting and speaking gibberish; Biden will be there, all blood eyed and smarmy, talking about how poor kids can be smart too (the more you know). I cry in a corner even considering such a spectacle. I'd rather see Topsy electrocuted than watch that.
Anyway, it's not unlikely that Warren will get a challenger for her senate seat due to this Judas move. The Bernie supporters will be generous with political donations if that individual materializes, I'm sure. But I'm guessing she will try something again in terms of reinvention and she will refer to herself as the politician formally known as Elizabeth Warren and try to get a judge show on antennae tv. I won't watch it even if she hits the gavel and says to leave the ghosting boyfriend and get a dog in the event of a sassy landlord tenant dispute brought before her court.
I plan on ghosting Elizabeth Warren and her lying ass.
Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest.
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Jan 18, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Warren is The Monkees of Democratic Socialism.Me Andrew • a day agoWarren is the Jussie Smollet of politics. I wonder if she claims Bernie attacked her while wearing a red hat and screaming, "A woman can't win! This is MAGA country!"former-vet Me • a day ago • editedIt's hillarious that even after the shafting they got in 2016 by CNN there are still some Bernie supporters who are finally catching on to what Trump supporters have been saying the whole time, the MSM are a bunch of lying propagandists. I wonder who these people are who think Bernie is going to fight against the Establishment when he can't even stand up for himself against CNN, Warren, Hillary, the DNC,.... or anyone.
I'm with you, Me. I expected to see Bernie come out swinging after that exchange with Senator Warren if he was to have any chance against Trump. Sucking it up for "the team" is loser talk. Warren accused him of blatantly lying on national TV, and he's okay with that?Storm in a tea cup.Connecticut Farmer Kathleen Garvey • a day agoThis manufactured 'controversy' has absolutely no relevance to electoral chances of either, outside of the campus/media bubble - whose battle lines are already entrenched.
Or, as the late historian Daniel Boorstin called it, a "pseudo-event."
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Jan 19, 2020 | failedevolution.blogspot.com
Then CNN turned to a story that it had reported on just prior to the debate, alleging that Sanders had told Senator Elizabeth Warren that he did not believe a woman could be elected U.S. president. The CNN moderator ignored Sanders' assertions that he had a public record going back decades of stating that a woman could be elected president, that he had stayed out of the race in 2015 until Warren decided not to run, and that in fact he had told Warren no such thing. Then came this exchange:
CNN: So Senator Sanders -- Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you're saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?SANDERS: That is correct.
CNN: Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?
You don't have to know that you'd be better off with free college and Medicare for All than with yet another war to recognize the bias here.Many viewers recognized the slant. Many even began to notice the strange double standard in never mentioning the cost of any of the wars, but pounding away on the misleading assertions that healthcare and other human needs cost too much. Here's a question asked by CNN on Tuesday:
" Vice President Biden, does Senator Sanders owe voters a price tag on his health care plan? "There was even time for this old stand-by bit of name-calling: " Senator Sanders, you call yourself a Democratic Socialist. But more than two-thirds of voters say they are not enthusiastic about voting for a socialist. Doesn't that put your chances of beating Donald Trump at risk? "
So say the people who did so much to elect Donald Trump.
Source, links:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/17/cnn-is-trash/
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Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Jackrabbit , Jan 18 2020 1:32 utc | 83
I agree with everyone that doesn't believe the political farce/headfake/psyop.The fact is, it's impossible to elect a real "populist outsider" as US President. The system is set up to ensure that NEVER happens.
I used to get very frustrated by b's failure to understand US politics but it's now clear to me that anti-USA/anti-Empire folks LOVE to talk up Trump because they think they can exploit a rift in USA power elite - a rift that doesn't really exist .
The standard push-back response to someone like me saying that Trump was selected as President is: bu..but Trump is not a puppet! LOL. That's right! He's a faux populist team player . Just like Obama.
I explain more at my blog. Start with this: https://jackrabbit.blog/2018/08/more-evidence-that-trump-was-the-deep-state-choice/ .
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Triangle of power ... corporate, executive government, and military factions
This is naive. It's an outdated theory. Anyone that knows American society knows that power has become concentrated since this theory was first proposed. And that concentration has put EMPIRE FIRST warmongers/neocons at the top of heap.
Furthermore, Russia's willingness to confront USA in 2013 and 2014 had a profound effect on the pampered Empire-builders that thought that they and their progeny would rule the world. The Trump psy-op is their answer to the challenge from Russia and China.
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Afghanistan and Trump's "lecture" to the GeneralsWell, Trump is STILL THERE (in Afghanistan), isn't he?
And I'd be very skeptical of anything WaPo had to say about Trump.
IMO Trump isn't looking to withdraw from Afghanistan, or NATO, or North Korea, or Syria, or anywhere else. He's looking for Generals that have a will to fight. And that's a very scary prospect.
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the military faction did not concur with his 'America first' isolationist tendencies.Sorry, virtually everybody that matters in USA ("the 1%") is EMPIRE FIRST. Trump's 'America First' is just a bullshit slogan to fool the masses. Just as much as Obama's "Change You Can Believe In" was.
Trump is NOT an isolationist. Why does this false narrative still persist? Trump's many acts of war attest to his belligerent interventionist nature:
> seizing Venezuelan government assets;> seizing Syrian oil fields;
> the assassination of an Iranian General;
> reneging on peace terms with North Korean (IMO reneging on a peace deal with a country that you're still technically at war with is an act of war);
> Pulling out of Cold War I arms treaties with Russia and militarizing space;
> taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - going against UN resolutions to do so;
> recognizing Golan Heights as Israeli - going against UN resolutions to do so;
> support for the Saudi war against Yemen - which includes arms sales, training, and even targeting.
These countries haven't declared war only because it's impractical to do so.Why can't people see what charlatans Obama and Trump are? What has Trump done to demonstrate that he will be true to his campaign rhetoric? Nothing! Trump:
- didn't prosecute Hillary;=- didn't "end Obamacare on day one";
- didn't exit from NATO;
- didn't exit from the Middle-east;
- hasn't ended the threat from North Korea;
- hasn't brought jobs back (we just have more low-end jobs);
- hasn't "drained the swamp".
Most of the 'dopes and babies' who were in that room have since been fired or retired.Really? What about this: Obama's Military Coup Purges 197 Officers In Five Years .
b's oversight highlights how the focus on TRUMP!! obscures what the Deep State has really been up to. And how even smart people like b are drawn into false narratives.
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... Trump seems to have a good chance to win the next election.Many moa commenters have been saying much the same. But the reasoning that three power centers are lined up for Trump is a red-herring.
Plus, whether Trump wins the next election or not, USA is on a path to war.
!!
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Jan 18, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Connecticut Farmer • a day ago
SCENARIO Iesquimaux • 11 hours agoJoe is conservative, libertarian or possibly both.
Joe opposes Bernie Sanders on ideological grounds.
Ergo, Joe and Bernie have a different worldview.SCENARIO II
Joe is conservative, libertarian or possibly both.
Joe opposes Liz Warren on ideological grounds.
Ergo, Joe is an unprincipled sexist.Being one of Liz' constituents and familiar with her career and her base (consisting of people like me,) I think she faces so little consequence for her "embellishments" at least in part because "we" (her base) inhabit an environment in which, with ease, we adjust facts and perceptions to conform to whatever our self-serving narrative of the moment may be.We know that Liz will say anything she imagines will be to her advantage and it's okay with "us" that she does. In a way, she's our ideal candidate and media darling because she reflects and affirms our plastic values.
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Jan 18, 2020 | caucus99percent.com
Let's look at the video again shall we?
The audio from the moment where Elizabeth Warren refused to shake Bernie Sanders' hand has been released.
The #DemDebate scuffle came after Warren accused Bernie Sanders of saying, a woman can't win, a claim that contradicts his public comments over decades and one he denies. pic.twitter.com/yVTRkyCb2d
-- BERNforBernie2020RegisterToVote(@BernForBernie20) January 16, 2020
Yep that woman is full of it. You can decide what 'it' is.
Aaron Mate:
Joy Reid should invite this body language expert back, tell the story about the time when a computer hacker inserted homophobic statements into her old blog posts, and ask the expert to analyze whether she's lying.
More from Aaron.
Did this Orwell quote inspire you in the present to make the false claim that a computer hacker wrote your homophobic posts in the past? https://t.co/HsMUGrJj9S
-- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 18, 2020
Brianna Joy
This campaign is owed an apology.
What are they going to do next, phrenology?
This is why no one trusts the media. These people are digging their own professional graves.People aren't buying what Joy is selling.
Interested timing for this letter to come out Bernie Sanders Called The Democratic Party 'Intellectually Bankrupt' In 1985 Letterjoy reid brings on a phrenologist to prove that liz warren's cheekbones make her native and dna test was wrong
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) once told a fellow left-wing activist that the Democratic Party was too "intellectually bankrupt" to allow the progressive movement to flourish within it.
In a 1985 letter newly obtained by HuffPost in which Sanders debated running for governor, he wrote: "Whether I run for governor or not is really not important. What would be a tragedy, however, is for people with a radical vision to fall into the pathetic camp of the intellectually bankrupt Democratic Party."
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Sanders' three-paragraph missive was addressed to Marty Jezer, an author and progressive activist in the state. Then-Mayor Sanders was writing in response to an August letter from Jezer in which he apologized that a memo he wrote to Sanders had leaked to the press. While the exact contents of the memo are unclear, Jezer's letter indicates that it encouraged Sanders to run for Congress instead of challenging Kunin."1986 is the wrong time for such a race," Jezer, who died in 2005, wrote. "I hope you will listen to the voices of the committed activists around the state. We sink or swim with this together."
Sanders ultimately reached a different conclusion: He ran against Kunin as an independent. But the decision was not without dissent. An editorial from the socialist magazine In These Times criticized Sanders for dividing the left.
"In choosing to create a three-way race, Sanders is dividing the left and making more likely the defeat of an incumbent liberal woman governor by a more conservative Republican," In These Times wrote. (At the time, Kunin was one of only two female governors in the country.)
The editorial prompted Sanders to reply: "I believe that the real changes that are needed in this country are not going to be brought about by working within the Democratic Party or the Republican Party."
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The Vermont senator's critiques of the Democratic Party are well documented, as CNN reported last July. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he was adamant that a progressive movement could not be built within the party and was highly critical of the moderate "New Democrats" who argued that the party's progressivism in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s had alienated voters."I think that nationally, the party has on issue after issue sold out so many times that if you go before the people and say, 'Hey, I'm a Democrat,' you don't usually generate a lot of enthusiasm," Sanders said in 1991 about the idea of a progressive trying to work within the party.
Commenting on civil rights activist Jesse Jackson's Democratic presidential runs in the 1980s, Sanders said he did not agree with Jackson's decision to work "within the Democratic Party." (Sanders endorsed Jackson's candidacy.) His skepticism of the party continued in subsequent decades. In 2011, he said Democrats could be called "Republican-lite" for considering cuts to Social Security and Medicare in order to lessen the deficit. And his first presidential campaign in 2016 didn't shy away from blasting the party apparatus.
Sanders' willingness to criticize the Democratic Party speaks to the progressive bona fides highlighted by his supporters. His campaign often relies on decades-old videos of Sanders warning against the Iraq war, multinational trade deals and the climate crisis using the same rhetoric he still uses today.
But the senator's view of the party -- and the role of progressive politics within it -- has evolved. He's since refined his critiques to focus on the "corporate wing of the Democratic Party," which is composed of the same centrists, including organizations like Third Way, that pushed the party to the right during the 1980s and '90s.
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That hasn't been enough for many of his critics, who accuse him of only half-heartedly campaigning for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 after dragging out the primary, and question whether he would be willing to support down-ballot Democratic candidates who don't share his progressive ideology.I recently watched Jimmy's show where he played a clip of Rachel praising Bernie for campaigning so hard for Her. Her wrote him a letter telling him thanks for working so hard to get her elected.
Bernie did 37 rallies for her in 14 days. Hillary only did 8 for Obama. Let's talk about this, Hillary! You worthless ^*#%^! - strife delivery
snoopydawg on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 7:21pm
Cenk might have just sunk his campaignIt turns out media sources might have leaked to one another about Warren-Sanders dispute & that didn't come from @ewarren campaign. Anyone still denying national media has hostility toward @BernieSanders campaign is being purposely obtuse. No one hates progressives more than MSM.
-- Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) January 18, 2020
Come on dude this ain't rocket science. It's true that the media has goosed this goose, but Warren doubled down on her accusations.
Man people are flying high on Twitter today. I'm seeing lots of great stuff that I'm not posting here.
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Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
c1ue , Jan 17 2020 23:59 utc | 68
Anyone who thinks impeachment will succeed needs to exit the Russiagate/DNC/CNN black hole.
And while I do believe Sanders could beat Trump, I have little faith the Clinton controlled DNC will allow that to happen.Warren has showed her true colors
Biden is a less competent male HRC and the rest of the field ranges from billionaires to Intel agency drones.
Sure, Trump could lose "if". What matters is the candidate, though and none of the candidates besides Sanders can energize enough people to beat Trump.
Rob , Jan 18 2020 0:29 utc | 75
@Daniel (13). You hit the nail on the head, brother. Trump bears responsibility for all of the shit he has pulled, which includes hiring the worst possible people to advise him and run his administration. Throwing blame on the jackasses around him only proves that he is the biggest jackass of all.And for the record, U.S. elections rarely turn on foreign policy issues. As Bill Clinton (another jackass, though much smarter) famously said: "It's the economy, stupid."
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Jan 17, 2020 | www.rt.com
The impeachment trial against Donald Trump is not just a "witch hunt," but a ploy to "rig" the Democratic nomination against Bernie Sanders and in favor of Joe Biden, the US president has claimed. "They are rigging the election again against Bernie Sanders, just like last time, only even more obviously," Trump tweeted on Friday.They are rigging the election again against Bernie Sanders, just like last time, only even more obviously. They are bringing him out of so important Iowa in order that, as a Senator, he sit through the Impeachment Hoax Trial. Crazy Nancy thereby gives the strong edge to Sleepy...
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2020"They are bringing him out of so important Iowa in order that, as a Senator, he sit through the Impeachment Hoax Trial," he continued. "Crazy Nancy thereby gives the strong edge to Sleepy Joe Biden, and Bernie is shut out again. Very unfair, but that's the way the Democrats play the game. Anyway, it's a lot of fun to watch."
Trump's theory isn't plucked entirely out of thin air. With the impeachment trial set to begin on Tuesday, Sanders will have to disrupt his campaign activity in Iowa and return to Washington DC to sit in the Senate, two weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Crucially for Sanders, the trial begins as he edges Biden out of the lead in the polls.
Also on rt.com Impeachment circus begins in earnest, and will change nothing
The caucuses are the first major contest in the presidential primary season, and eight out of the last 12 caucus winners went on to win the Democratic party's nomination.
Sanders' fellow 2020 frontrunner Elizabeth Warren will also return to DC to hear the case against Trump, while Biden, the former Vice President, will be free to stump for support with impunity.
Trump has savaged the case against him from multiple angles, alternately calling it "presidential harassment," a "partisan hoax," and a "witch hunt" led by the "Do Nothing Democrats." Lately, however, the president has taken to stoking division among his opponents, talking up "Crazy Bernie Sanders" surge in the polls and amplifying a brewing feud between Sanders and Warren – two candidates representing the leftist, progressive wing of the Democratic party.
Bernie Sander's volunteers are trashing Elizabeth "Pocahontus" Warren. Everybody knows her campaign is dead and want her potential voters. Mini Mike B is also trying, but getting tiny crowds which are all leaving fast. Elizabeth is very angry at Bernie. Do I see a feud brewing?
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2020Friday's tweet isn't the first time Trump has accused the Democrats of stacking the cards against Sanders. Last April, he suggested that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was "again working its magic in its quest to destroy Crazy Bernie Sanders for the more traditional, but not very bright, Sleepy Joe Biden."
The Democratic establishment is widely believed to have "rigged" the 2016 primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton, with an email leak from within the DNC revealing the extent of the bias . Clinton was notified of debate questions in advance, her foundation was allowed to staff and fund the DNC, and Sanders' campaign strategy was secretly passed to the Clinton camp.
The rest is history, and whether the impeachment trial is an intentional move to muscle Sanders out of contention or not, The Democratic Party looks in danger of repeating the mistakes that cost it the White House in 2016.
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Thulean Friend , says: Show Comment December 23, 2019 at 5:34 am GMTJan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com
,
About this whole Ukraine-Russia gas transit thing that Felix is panicking about. It seems Germany had a key role in facilitating the deal.Thulean Friend , says: Show Comment December 24, 2019 at 4:43 am GMTHowever, that risk receded this week after Moscow and Kyiv concluded a landmark agreement that will ensure Russian gas continues to transit through Ukraine even after Nord Stream 2 is completed. Germany played a critical role in brokering the agreement and pressuring Russia to maintain Ukraine's transit status.
Why would Germany spend all this time and resources to construct these pipelines and then suddenly pressure Russia to maintain the transit fees? That makes zero sense unless you believe that Germany was acting as a proxy on behalf of a greater power. My pet theory: Germany most likely caved to US pressure and tried to triangulate at the last minute in a bid to stave off a larger German-US conflict.
@Swedish FamilyWhat Germany wants, it seems to me, is (1) cheap energy for German industry, (2) a maximally weak Russian hand visavi Ukraine (which is now in effect a NATO/EU dependency), and (3) good enough relations with the Kremlin for Russia not to go rogue. Goals (1) and (3) obviously sit uneasily with goal (2), which is why we see so much back and forth.
I agree with (1) and (3) but I'd disagree over (2). I am not convinced Germany cares much about Ukraine's well-being. It is a very small economy (barely over 100 billion USD) and Germany's trade exposure to Ukraine is minimal. It isn't part of NATO, EU or any other major Western framework.
If Ukraine collapsed it would create significant refugee streams but Ukrainians are very easily assimilated into Western European countries, unlike Syrians or Turks, so even in a worse-case scenario the fallout would not be a major problem. If Croats or Serbs can mix into Germany easily, I don't see why Ukrainians would be a problem. Germany's shrinking work force would in fact even need such an influx. The only kink would be Russia's expanding borders if both Belarus+Ukraine was swallowed up but Germany probably would calculate that Russia wouldn't attack a NATO ally (and they wouldn't be wrong). I'm not saying Germany would want such an outcome, only that the worst-case scenario wouldn't be a big problem for them.
I think this has the fingerprints of the US all over it. Trump personally hates Ukraine, which has been documented in leaked documents during the impeachment process and major personalities of the Trumpist movement like Tucker Carlson openly cheers for Russia. So it wasn't Trump or his people who pushed for this but rather the permanent national-security state that was behind it and they are obsessed with keeping Russia down, or inventing fake Russiagate hoaxes to justify their paranoia. Germany made a 180 and suddenly pressured Russia to do something which Germany itself had no interest in keeping for the longest time. That suggests Germany caved to US pressure and tried to do a compromise. The US interest would be for NS2 to be scrapped completely. This was a German attempt at triangulating.
Either way, Ukraine got a big win purely because of Great Power politics over which they had no direct control.
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Jan 16, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
drumlin woodchuckles , , January 14, 2020 at 7:13 pm
Today's Democrats want to destroy those social programs you cite. They have wanted to destroy those social programs ever since President Clinton wanted to conspire with "Prime Minister" Gingrich to privatize Social Security. Luckily Monica Lewinsky saved us from that fate.
A nominee Sanders would run on keeping Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid in existence. And he would mean it. A nominee Biden might pretend to say it. But he would conspire with the Republicans to destroy them all.
The ClintoBama Pelosicrats have no standing on which to pretend to support some very popular social programs and hope to be believed any longer. Maybe that is why they feel there is no point in even pretending any more.
drumlin woodchuckles , , January 14, 2020 at 7:22 pm
Bearing in mind the fact that the DemParty would prefer a Trump re-election over a Sanders election, I don't think anyone will be giving Trump any heave ho. The only potential nominee to even have a chance to defeat Trump would be Sanders. And if Sanders doesn't win on ballot number one, Sanders will not be permitted the nomination by an evil Trumpogenic DemParty elite.
Even if Sanders wins the nomination, the evil Trumpogenic Demparty leadership and the millions of Jonestown Clintobamas in the field will conspire against Sanders every way they feel they can get away with. The Clintobamas would prefer Trump Term Two over Sanders Term One. They know it, and the rest of us need to admit it.
If Sanders is nominated, he will begin the election campaign with a permanent deficit of 10-30 million Clintobama voters who will Never! Ever! vote for Sanders. Sanders will have to attract enough New Voters to drown out and wash away the 10-30 million Never Bernie clintobamas.
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Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Kali , Jan 16 2020 18:40 utc | 12
Now that Warren has been exposed as the charlatan ( The Damned Debates ) many of us knew she was all along, the media is all freaked out that her plan to attack Bernie Sanders is backfiring and that she is losing support rather than gaining it.It looks to many like she made a deal with the Wall St. crowd funding the DNC who support Biden to attack Bernie for them in exchange for a VP spot.
They are obviously very worried about Biden though because the Trump-GOP attack on Biden over Burisma is coming, and they know they have nothing to stop it. That is what the impeachment is all about ( Impeachment For Dummies: or How progressives were conned into supporting Joe Biden for President ), and what the recent claim of Russia hacking to harm Biden is all about. It is all about trying to protect Biden from the upcoming Trump-GOP Burisma related attack on Biden. So with Biden in trouble and Warren stumbling, expect Hillary to save the day? LOL.
They are worried, but unless Bernie is far ahead when it matters then the superdelegates will save them. But if they do that then they fear many people will go 3rd party next election cycle, meaning the DNC has no chance to beat the GOP in the future if that happens.
What will they do? Right now they are full on trying to threaten their way to keep their new world order as it crumbles around them ( Pax Americana: Between Iraq and A Hard Place ). Times they are a changin.
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Jan 16, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Ignacio , , January 15, 2020 at 5:58 am
Talking about centrists following strictly Trump's playbook, another good example is Warren's take on Soleimani's killing.
If she believes that she has any chance of defeating Trump as a strong defender of the US against terrorism, she must be drinking some new kind of kool-aid.
Fortunately, in this sense, Sanders is being much more clever than Warren. I see Sanders as the only and last opportunity to avoid the worst.
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Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Trailer Trash , Jan 8 2020 16:32 utc | 105
Trump is such a douchebag. He claims there were no lives lost due to their "early warning system" -- no mention that the "early warning system" was a phone call!Now he's once again justifying assassination, etc.
pretzelattack , Jan 8 2020 16:39 utc | 110
there was no "better choice" between trump and clinton. i still think clinton represented a greater danger than trump of getting into a war with russia, but they are both warmongers first class. for our next election, we may have a choice between ebola and flesh eating bacteria, or brain cancer and leprosy. if the game is rigged there's no winning it playing by the game's "rules".
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Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Mao , Jan 12 2020 10:48 utc | 403
PopulismIf the concerns of ordinary people were not overlooked, if their interests were not neglected and their desires not betrayed, there would be no opportunity for anyone to come along and finally give them the acknowledgement and representation that they deserve since they would already be satisfied.
But their voice is ignored, there trust constantly abused and their hopes ultimately forsaken.
If the public was cared for at all, what reason would there be for them to feel indignation or disappointment? How could there be anything to appeal to at all? How could there be any unspoken sentiment to tap into and arouse? Those who pledge to pull the rug out from under the feet of the establishment criminals that call themselves politicians are smeared and threatened. There cannot be a restoration of positive values and policies, and the public most definitely cannot have their needs not just insincerely addressed, but positively fulfilled. In what kind of world is someone who sympathizes with popular opinion fervently attacked? What does it say about a society that condemns a truly popular leader who is confided in and adored? A leader that vows to give the people their pride and dignity back? To reinstate a semblance of order? To persecute the traitors that have sacrificed their future on the alter of usury and greed? No. The clique must not be held to account for their crimes, and the concept of justice must remain theoretical. The term populist is perceived negatively. But why? I will tell you why. Because the charlatans that call themselves leaders today fear their milk and honey being wrested from their grimy little paws.
Alan Sabrosky
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Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Likklemore , Jan 11 2020 17:48 utc | 201
At 2016, here is the long bombing list of the 32 countries by the late William Blum. Did I mention sanctions is an Act of War?Little u.s. has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying. Albright thought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it. !!! it was worth killings and maiming.
Over $7 trillion spent while homelessness is rampant. Healthcare is unaffordable for the 99% of the population.
The u.s. will leave Iraq and Syria aka Saigon 1975 or horizontal. It's over.
2020: u.s. Stands Alone.
Searching for friends. Now, after Russiagate here is little pompous: "we want to be friends with Russia." Sanctions much excepting we need RD180 engines, seizure of diplomatic properties. Who are you kidding?
"we seek a constructive and productive relationship with the Russian Federation".
What a bunch of hypocrites? How dare you criticize commenters who see little u.s. in the light of day, not a shining beacon on the hill..
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Jan 11, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Can The US Assassination Of Qassem Soleimani Be Justified? Posted on January 10, 2020 by Yves Smith Yves here. Even though the angst over "what next" with the US/Iran confrontation has fallen a bit, there is still a depressingly significant amount of mis- and dis-information about the Soleimani assassination. This post is a nice high level treatment that might be a good candidate for circulating among friends and colleagues who've gotten a hefty dose of MSM oversimplifications and social media sloganeering.
Update 6:50 AM: Due to the hour, I neglected to add a quibble, and readers jumped on the issue in comments. First, it has not been established who launched the attack that killed a the US contractor. The US quickly asserted it was Kat'ib Hezbollah, but there were plenty of groups in the area that had arguably better motives, plus Kat'ib Hezbollah has denied it made the strike. Second, Kat'ib Hezbollah is an Iraqi military unit.
By Barkley Rosser, Professor of Economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Originally published at EconoSpeak
We know from various Congressional folks that briefers of Congress have failed to produce any evidence of "imminent" plans to kill Americans Soleimani was involved with that would have made this a legal killing rather than an illegal assassination. The public statements by administration figures have cited such things as the 1979 hostage crisis, the already dead contractor, and, oh, the need to "reestablish deterrence" after Trump did not follow through on previous threats he made. None of this looks remotely like "imminent plans," not to mention that the Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi has reported that Soleimani was on the way to see him with a reply to a Saudi peace proposal. What a threatening imminent plan!
As it is, despite the apparent lack of "imminent plans" to kill Americans, much of the supporting rhetoric for this assassination coming out of Trump supporters (with bragging about it having reportedly been put up on Trump's reelection funding website) involves charges that Soleimani was "the world's Number One terrorist" and was personally responsible for killing 603 Americans in Iraq. Even as many commentators have noted the lack of any "imminent plans," pretty much all American ones have prefaced these questions with assertions that Soleimani was unquestionable "evil" and "bad" and a generally no good guy who deserved to be offed, if not right at this time and in this way. He was the central mastermind and boss of a massive international terror network that obeyed his orders and key to Iran's reputed position as "the Number One state supporter of terrorism," with Soleimani the key to all of that.
Of course, in Iran it turns out that Soleimani was highly respected, even as many oppose the hawkish policies he was part of. He was viewed as crucial to the victory over ISIS/ISIL/Daesh in Iraq, much feared by Iranians. Shia take martyrdom seriously, and he is viewed as a martyr. It appears that even Trump took notice of the massive outpouring of mourning and praise for Soleimani there up to the point of people dying in a stampede in a mourning crowd in his hometown. But, hey, obviously these people simply do not understand that he was The World's Number One Terrorist! Heck, I saw one commenter on Marginal Revolution claiming Soleimani was responsible killing "hundreds of thousands." Yes, this sort of claim is floating around out there.
A basic problem here is that while indeed Soleimani commanded the IGRC al Quds force that supported and supplied various Shia militias in several Middle Eastern nations, these all were (and are) ultimately independent. Soleimani may have advised them, but he was never in a position to order any of them to do anything. Al Quds itself has never carried out any of the various attacks outside of Iran that Soleimani is supposedly personally responsible for.
Let us consider the specific case that gets pushed most emphatically, the 603 Americans dead in Iraq, without doubt a hot button item here in the US. First of all, even if Soleimani really was personally responsible for their deaths, there is the technical matter that their deaths cannot be labeled "terrorism." That is about killing non-combatant civilians, not military personnel involved in combat. I do not support the killing of those American soldiers, most of whom were done in by IEDs, which also horribly injured many more. But indeed this awful stuff happened. But in fact this was all done by Iraqi -based Shia militias. Yes, they were supported by Soleimani, but while some have charged al Quds suppplied the IEDs, this turns out not to be the case. These were apparently made in Iraq by these local militias. Soleimani's al Quds are not totally innocent in all this, reportedly providing some training and some inputs. But the IEDs were made by the militias themselves and planted by them.
It is also the case that when the militias and Americans were working together against ISIS/IISIL/Daesh, none of this happened, and indeed that was still the case up until this most recent set of events, with the death setting off all this an American civilian contractor caught on a base where several Iraqis were killed by a rocket from the Kat'b Hezbollah Iraqi group. Of course with Trump having Soleimani assassinated, this cooperation has ceased, with the US military no longer either fighting ISIS/ISIL/Daesh nor training the Iraqi military. Indeed, the Iraqi parliament has demanded that US troops leave entirely, although Trump threatened Iraq with economic sanctions if that is followed through on.
As it is, the US datinrg back to the Obama administration has been supplying Saudi Arabia with both arms and intelligence that has been used to kill thousands of Yemeni civilians. Frankly, US leaders look more like terrorists than Soleimani.
I shall close by noting the major changes in opinion in both Iran and Iraq regarding the US as a result of this assassination. In Iran as many have noted there were major demonstrations against the regime going on, protesting bad economic conditions, even as those substantially were the result of the illegal US economic sanctions imposed after the US withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear deal, to which Iran was adhering. Now those demonstrations have stopped and been replaced by the mass demonstrations against the US over Soleimani's assassination. And we also have Iran further withdrawing from that deal and moving to more highly enrich uranium.
In Iraq, there had been major anti-Iran demonstrations going on, with these supported to some degree by the highest religious authority in the nation, Ayatollah Ali Sistani. However, when Soleimani's body was being transferred to Iran, Sistani's son accompanied his body. It really is hard to see anything that justifies this assassination.
I guess I should note for the record that I am not a fan of the Iranian regime, much less the IGRC and its former and new commander. It is theocratic and repressive, with many political prisoners and a record of killing protestors. However, frankly, it is not clearly all that much worse than quite a few of its neighboring regimes. While Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei was not popularly elected, its president, Rouhani, was, who obeyed popular opinion in negotiating the JCPOA that led to the relaxation of economic sanctions, with his power reduced when Trump withdrew from the agreement. Its rival Saudi Arabia has no democracy at all, and is also a religiously reactionary and repressive regime that uses bone saws on opponents and is slaughtering civilians in a neighboring nation.
xkeyscored , January 10, 2020 at 6:12 am
with the death setting off all this an American civilian contractor caught on a base where several Iraqis were killed by a rocket from the Kat'b Hezbollah Iraqi group.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding this, but it appears to be presented here as a fact.
Kat'b Hezbollah have denied responsibility for that rocket attack. To the best of my knowledge, no proof whatsoever has been presented that it was not an attack by jihadis in the area, whom Khat'b Hezbollah were fighting, or by others with an interest in stirring the pot.Cat Burglar , January 10, 2020 at 12:37 pm
They are having a hard time coming up with public evidence to support any justification, aren't they?
The latest was Pence's "keeping it secret to protect sources and methods" meme. Purely speculating here, but I immediately thought, "Oh, Israeli intelligence." Gotta protect allies in the region.
xkeyscored , January 10, 2020 at 1:38 pm
Debka, run by supposedly-former Israeli military intelligence, was enthusing about upcoming joint operations against Iran and its allies a month or two ago. In contrast, they've been uncharacteristically quiet, though supportive of the US, regarding recent developments.
Trump and Netanyahu confirm US-Israel military coordination against threatened Iranian attack
A US-Iran military front is fast shaping up on the Syrian-Iraqi border – with a role for the IDF
Dwight , January 10, 2020 at 6:32 am
Secretary of State Pompeo claimed that Soleimani was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria. Basically blaming Iran for all deaths in the Syrian war.
Donald , January 10, 2020 at 8:35 am
People more commonly do this with Assad. A complicated war with multiple factions fighting each other, armed by outside sources including the US, most with horrific human rights records, but almost every pundit and politician in the US talks as though Assad killed everyone personally.
Once in a while you get a little bit of honesty seeping in, but it never changes the narrative. Caitlin Johnstone said something about that, not specifically about Syria. The idea was that you can sometimes find facts reported in the mainstream press that contradict the narrative put out by pundits and politicians and for that matter most news stories, but these contradictory facts never seem to change the prevailing narrative.
ChrisFromGeorgia , January 10, 2020 at 9:15 am
That sounds suspiciously like sour grapes and another possible motive for the killing – revenge.
Soleimani led a number of militias that were successful in defeating the Saudi (and CIA) sponsored Sunni jihadis who failed to implement the empire's "regime change" playbook in Syria.
No doubt a lot of guys like Pompeo wanted him dead for that reason alone.
Thuto , January 10, 2020 at 6:36 am
The simple answer NO, killing a sitting army general of a sovereign state on a diplomatic mission resides in the realm of the truly absurd. Twisting the meaning of the word "imminent" far beyond its ordinary use to justify the murder is even more absurd. And the floating subtext to all this talk about lost American lives is that the US can invade and occupy foreign lands, engage in the sanctimonious slaughter of locals and whoever else gets in the way of feeding the bloodlust of Pompeo and his ilk (to say nothing of feeding the outsized ego of a lunatic like Trump), and yet expect to suffer no combat casualties from those defending their lands. It's the most warped form of "exceptional" thinking.
As an aside, I wonder if the msm faithfully pushing the talk about Iran downing that Ukrainian commercial jet is designed to take the heat off a beleaguered Boeing. The investigation hasn't even begun but already we have the smoking gun, Iran did it.
Olga , January 10, 2020 at 8:27 am
Even the question is wrong. The killing was cowardly, outside all international norms (this from a country that dares to invoke "international order" whenever it is suitable), a colossal mistake, a strategic blunder, and plain destructive.
The more one learns about QS' activities, the more it seems that he was "disposed of" precisely because of his unique talent and abilities to bring together the various local factions (particularly, in Iraq), so that then – unified – they could fight against the common enemy (guess who?). He was not guilty of killing amrikans – nor was he planning to – his "sin" was to try and unite locals to push the us out of ME. It was always going to be an uphill battle, but in death he may – in time – achieve his wish.Susan the other , January 10, 2020 at 11:49 am
I'm in this camp too. But with a twist. Pure speculation here – and I'm sure it would never be exposed, but is there even any proof we did it? Was it an apache helicopter or a drone; whom have we supplied with these things? Who is this bold? Since our military has been dead-set-against assassinating Soleimani or any other leader it seems highly unlikely they proposed this to Trump. Mattis flatly refused to even consider such a thing. So I keep wondering if the usual suspect might be the right one – the Israelis. They have the proper expertise. And the confusion that followed? If we had done it we'd have had our PSAs ready to print. Instead we proffered an unsigned letter and other "rough drafts" of the incident and then retracted them like idiots. As if we were frantic to step in and prevent the Rapture. We could have taken the blame just to prevent a greater war. Really, that's what it looks like to me.
bold'un , January 10, 2020 at 5:19 pm
Surely the whole point of the strike is that it was illegal: that is to say that it was a message to the Iraqis that they are NOT allowed to help Iran evade sanctions, NOT allowed to do oil-for-infrastructure deals with China and NOT allowed to invite senior Iranians around for talks: i.e. Iraq is not yet sovereign and it is the US that makes the rules around there; any disobedience will summarily be punished by the de facto rulers even if that violates agreements and laws applicable in Iraq.
If you disagree, then what should the US do if Iraq does not toe the Western line?
makedonamend , January 11, 2020 at 4:29 am
Hiya Olga & t'Others,
" The killing was cowardly, outside all international norms (this from a country that dares to invoke "international order" whenever it is suitable), a colossal mistake, a strategic blunder, and plain destructive "
I think the immediate impact which has long terms implications for how other countries view USA foreign policy is simply that any high ranking individual from any other country on earth has got to be aware that essentially no international norms now exist. It's one thing to 'whack' a bin Laden or dispose of a Gaddafi but another whole kettle of fish to assassinate a high ranking official going about their business who's no immediate security threat to the USA and when no state of war exists.
For example, might a EU general now acquiesce to demands about NATO? Not saying this is going to happen by a long shot, but still a niggling thought might linger. Surely the individual will be resentful at the very least. I'm also reminded of a story about John Bolton allegedly telling a negotiator (UN or European?) that Bolton knew where the negotiator's family resided. These things add up.
As Sergey Lavrov and President Putin have stated for a long time (and long before President Trump came along), the USA is 'agreement incapable'. However, now you have to wonder if any country really trusts any agreement they will make with the USA. Without trust on any level, cooperation/trade treaties and so on on are impossible or eminently disposable, i.e., not worth the paper upon which they are written.
This is where the middle term ramifications start to kick-in. We know that Russia and China are making some tentative steps towards superficial integration in limited areas beyond just cooperation. Will they find more common ground? Will European countries (and by extension the EU) really start to deliver on an alternative financial clearing system? How will India and Japan react? Does nationalism of the imperial variety re-emerge as a world force – for good or bad?
Will regional powers such as Russia, China, India, France or Iran quietly find more common ground also? But alliances are problematic and sometimes impose limitations that are exploitable. So, might a different form of cooperation emerge?
Long term its all about advantage and trust. Trust is a busted flush now. (My 2 cents, and properly priced.)
vlade , January 10, 2020 at 6:40 am
As Thuto above says, the simple answer is "No". IF S was guilty of all those things ascribed to him, he'd have been judged and sentenced (yes, I do realise Iran would never extradite him etc. etc. – but there would have been a process and after the process, well, some things would be more justifiable). But we have the process because it's important to have a process – otherwise, anyone can find themselves on a hit list for any reason whatsoever.
If the US doesn't want to follow and process, then it can't be suprised if others won't. Ignoring the process works for the strongest, while they are the strongest. And then it doesn't.
timbers , January 10, 2020 at 6:53 am
603 Americans killed in Iraq, he says Trump supporters claim, but we had millions of Iraqi's, Syrians, Libyans and others killed or their lives uprooted by Bush and Obama and company – yet they were not assassinated.
I think – just a guess – the reason Soleimani was killed can be summed up in one word:
Netanyahu.
That, and on a broader, bird's eye view level in broad strokes – Michael Hudson's recent article outlining U.S. policy of preserving USD hegemony at all costs, that has existed since at least the 1950's, which depicts Soleimani's assassination as not a Trump qwerk but a logical application of that policy.
You might say the swamp drainers came to drain the swamp and ended filling it up instead.
Darius , January 10, 2020 at 8:04 am
The mostest terriblest guy in the history of this or any other universe, but the average Joe never heard of until they announced they killed him. His epochal terribleness really flew under the radar.
Wukchumni , January 10, 2020 at 8:14 am
A joke I heard on the slopes yesterday: Nobody had ever heard of Soleimani, and then he blew up overnight, so now everybody knows who he is.
Philo Beddoh , January 10, 2020 at 8:13 am
The swamp drainers are so busy guzzling as much as they can quaff, without drowning; writhing each others' dead-eyed, bloated feeding frenzy; that obscene media distractions need to escalate in sadistic, off-hand terror. But, it's so ingrained into our governance, we just call it democracy?
Susan the other , January 10, 2020 at 12:05 pm
Hudson's take on USD hegemony is reasonable, but I don't think we'd assassinate Soleimani in anticipation of losing it. We have dealt with all the sects in the middle east for a long time and we have come to terms with them, until now. In a time that requires the shutting down of oil and gas production. I think (Carney, Keen, Murphy, etc.) oil is the basis for our economy, for productivity, for the world, that's a no brainer. But my second thoughts go more along the lines that oil and natural gas will be government monopolies directly – no need to use those resources to make the dollar or other currencies monopolies. Sovereign currency will still be a sovereign monopoly regardless of the oil industry. That also explains why we want hands-on control of this resource. And with that in mind, it would seem Soleimani might have been more of an asset for us.
Yves Smith Post author , January 10, 2020 at 8:48 pm
I hate to tell you but as much as we are fans of Hudson, he's all wet on this one. The dollar is the reserve currency because the US is willing to run sustained trade deficits, which is tantamount to exporting jobs. Perhaps more important, my connected economists say they know of no one who has the ear of the military-intel state who believes this either. This may indeed have been a line of thought 50 years ago but it isn't now.
rusti , January 10, 2020 at 7:18 am
much of the supporting rhetoric for this assassination coming out of Trump supporters (with bragging about it having reportedly been put up on Trump's reelection funding website)
I thought I had a pretty strong stomach for this stuff, but it's been really nauseating for me to see the displays of joy and flag waving over the assassination of someone the overwhelming majority of people were wholly unaware of prior to his death. My guess is that it's mostly just a sort of schadenfreude at the squirming of Democrats as they (with few exceptions) fail to articulate any coherent response.
The response should be clear without any caveats, "Trump is a coward who would never gamble with his life, but will happily gamble with the lives of your kids in uniform." This should resonate with most people, I don't believe that neocons really have any grassroots support.
carl , January 10, 2020 at 7:27 am
NO. Shockingly bad decision; you can just manage to glimpse around the edges of the war propaganda the embarrassment and backpedaling for having willingly stepped into such a gigantic steaming pile of excrement. The parade of smooth-faced liars on the MSM asserting that the US is now safer (the "war is peace" crowd) is sickening. Some even have the gall to assert that the enormous crowds in Iran are forced to attend by the repressive regime. Of course, there's no evidence of a provocation and they'll never produce any.
PlutoniumKun , January 10, 2020 at 7:49 am
Politico Europe is reporting that behind Europes seemingly supine response, officials and politicians are 'seething' over the attack. Its clearly seen around the world as not just illegal, but an appalling precedent.
So far, American efforts to convince Europeans of the bright side of Soleimani's killing have been met with dropped jaws .
The Historian , January 10, 2020 at 10:30 am
The silence from other countries on this event has been deafening. And that should tell Trump and Pompeo something, but I doubt if they are smart enough to figure it out.
I find it interesting that Pompeo was "disappointed" – what did he think would happen? For a Secretary of State, he's obviously extremely out of touch with the rest of the world if he didn't have some realistic idea of how this would go down.
Eclair , January 10, 2020 at 11:17 am
One wonders it this will be recalled as the episode in which the US finally jumped the shark.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef , January 10, 2020 at 2:56 pm
On one hand, the life of each and every victim of head-separation and droning is as precious as that of one Soleimani.
On the other, the general's is more precious and thus, the behind the scene seething by Europe's politicians and officials. (They and many others are all potential targets now, versus previously droning wedding guests – time to seethe).
Which is it? More precious or equally precious?
Harry , January 10, 2020 at 7:57 am
The more I think about it, the more it seemed like the Administration and its allies were probing to see how far they could go. They bombed PMUs and appeared to get away with it. So then they upped the ante when the Iraqis complained and finally got some moderate push-back. Not taking American lives in the missile strike seems to prove they Iranians didn't want to escalate. Still, I dont know about the Pentagon, but I was impressed with the accuracy.
Procopius , January 10, 2020 at 7:01 pm
I was impressed with the accuracy.
Yes. From the picture at Vineyard of the Saker, they hit specific buildings. There were comments after the drone attack on Abqaiq and Khurais oil fields in KSA that they showed surprising accuracy, but perhaps this time surprised the intelligence agencies. Perhaps that was why Trump declared victory instead of further escalating. This is speculation, of course.
The Rev Kev , January 10, 2020 at 7:23 pm
There is also a good article giving more detail of these attacks and underlining the fact that not a single solitary missile was intercepted. What percentage did the Syrians/Russians manage to intercept of the US/UK/French missiles attack back in 2018? Wasn't it about seventy percent?
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/01/the-strike-ttg.html
Yves Smith Post author , January 10, 2020 at 8:51 pm
The Iranians are not done retaliating. They have a history of disproportionate retaliation, but when the right opportunity presents itself, and that routinely takes years. The limited strike was out of character and appears to have been the result of the amount of upset internally over the killing.
Darius , January 10, 2020 at 8:12 am
I have more a lot more respect for the strategic acumen of the Iranian regime than I do for that of the American regime. Now it's led by a collection of fragile male egos and superstitious rapture ready religious fanatics. Before them the regime was led by cowardly corporate suck ups. They all take their cues from the same military intelligence complex.
lyman alpha blob , January 10, 2020 at 8:18 am
One other glaring omission from the article – the only reason there was a US military contractor in Iraq available to be killed in the first place is due to the illegal war based on false premises launched almost two decades ago by the US, which continues to occupy the country to this day.
Pretty clear who the terrorists are on this case.
Amfortas the hippie , January 10, 2020 at 8:55 am
Aye! This!
assume a ladder on a windy day, with a hammer irresponsibly left perched on the edge of the top rung.
if i blithely walk under that ladder just as the wind gusts and get bonked in the head by the falling hammer whose fault is it?
we shouldn't be there in the first damned place.and as soon as the enabling lies were exposed, we should have left, post haste .leaving all kinds of money and apologies in our wake.
to still be hanging around, unwanted by the locals, all these years later is arrogant and stupid.during the Bush Darkness, i was accused to my face(even strangled, once!) of being an american-hating traitor for being against the war, the Bush Cabal, and the very idea of American Empire.
almost 20 years later, I'm still absolutely opposed to those things not least out of a care for the Troops(tm) .and a fervent wish that for once in my 50 years i could be proud to be an American.
what a gigantic misallocation of resources, in service of rapine and hegemony, while my fellow americans suffer and wither and scratch around for crumbs.
Mikel , January 10, 2020 at 8:32 am
Another of many questions that remain involve the warped interpretation of "imminent" of the Bethlehem Doctrine. What institution will put a full stop to that doctrine of terror?
It is a global hazard to continue to let that be adopted as any kind of standard.Susan the other , January 10, 2020 at 12:15 pm
Under the Bethlehem Doctrine the entire political class in the USA, and possibly a few other countries, could be assassinated. What is legal or justified for one is justified for all.
David , January 10, 2020 at 8:33 am
Rosser is an economist rather than a philosopher or. jurist, and so he doesn't appear to realize that "justification" in the abstract is meaningless. An act can only be justified or not according to some ethical or legal principle, and you need to say what that principle is at the beginning before you start your argument. He doesn't do that, so his argument has no more validity than that of someone you get into a discussion with in a bar or over coffee at work.
Legally, of course, there is no justification, because there was no state of armed conflict between the US and Iran, so the act was an act of state murder. It doesn't matter who the person was or what we was alleged to have done or be going to do. There's been a dangerous tendency developing in recent years to claim some kind of right to pre-emptive attacks. There is no such legal doctrine, and the ultimate source of the misrepresentation – Art 51 of the UN Charter – simply recognizes that nothing in the Charter stops a state resisting aggression until help arrives. That's it.
Oh, and of course if this act were "justified" then any similar act in a similar situation would be justified as well, which might not work out necessarily to America's advantage.Carolinian , January 10, 2020 at 8:36 am
Via ZH site this article is an interesting take on the situation
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/donald-trump-has-just-blown-up-his-goal-of-isolating-iran/
General Jonathan Shaw, former commander of UK forces in Iraq, put it well: Iran's objectives are political, not military. Their aim is not to destroy any American air base, but to drive a wedge between the US and its Arab allies -- and the Soleimani assassination has achieved more to this end than anything that could have been cooked up in Tehran. The Sunnis are standing down and the US and Israel now once again face being without real friends in the region. When push came to shove, all Kushner's efforts amounted to nothing. How elated the Iranians must be, even in the midst of such a setback.
Which if true means that instead of divide and conquer Trump and Pompeo may instead be practicing unite and be conquered when it comes to US meddling in the Middle East.
The Rev Kev , January 10, 2020 at 10:07 am
I think that I see a danger for Israel here with a very tight pucker factor. I had assumed that if there was a war between Israel and Hezbollah, that Hezbollah would let loose their older rockets first to use up the Israeli anti-missile ordinance that they have. After that would come their modern accurate missiles.
But part of that Iranian attack on those US bases was the use of older missiles that had been retro-fitted with gear for accurate targeting which obviously worked out spectacularly. Israel could assume that Iran would have given Hezbollah the same technology and the implication here is that any first wave of older Hezbollah missiles would just be as accurate as the following barrages of newer missiles.
Susan the other , January 10, 2020 at 12:36 pm
I wonder if it is remotely possible that all countries, say at the UN, could design acceptable language to make oil and natural gas a universal resource with a mandated conservation – agreed to by all. Those countries which have had oil economies and have become rich might agree to it because the use of oil and gas will be so restricted in future that they will not have those profits. But it would at least provide them with some steady income. It would prevent the oil wars we will otherwise have in our rush to monopolize the industry for profit; it would conserve the use of oil/gas and extend it farther out into the future so we can build a sustainable worldwide civilization and mitigate much of the damage we have done to the planet, etc. How can we all come together and make energy, oil and natgas access a universal human right (for the correct use)?
The Rev Kev , January 10, 2020 at 8:38 am
Actually Soleimani was guilty of the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Tens of thousands of ISIS fighters that is. Do they count? The Saudis, Gulf States and the CIA may shed a tear for them but nobody else will. When Soleimani arrived in Baghdad, he was traveling in a diplomatic capacity to help try to ease off tensions between the Saudis and the Iranians. And this was the imminent danger that Trump was talking about. Not an imminent danger to US troops but a danger that the Saudis and Iranians might negotiate an accommodation. Michael Hudson has said similar in a recent article.
I think that what became apparent from that attack last year on the Saudi oil installations was that they were now a hostage. In other words, if the US attacks Iran, then Iran will take out the entirety of Saudi oil production and perhaps the Saudi Royal family themselves. There is no scenario in an Iran-US war where the Kingdom come out intact. So it seems that they have been putting out feelers with the Iranians about coming to an accommodation. This would explain why when Soleimani was murdered, there was radio silence on behalf of the Saudis.
Maybe Trump has worked out that all of the Saudi oil facilities becoming toast would be bad for America too but, more importantly, to himself personally. After all, what is the point of having the Saudis only sell their oil in US dollars if there is no oil to sell? What would such a development do to the standing of the US dollar internationally? The financial crisis would sink his chances for a win this November and that is something that he will never allow. And I bet that he did not Tucker Carlson to tell him that.
nippersdad , January 10, 2020 at 10:17 am
Fascinating developments on this issue today. Pompeo admits that nothing was "imminent." Given the very specific definitions of Imminence that draw red lines between what is or is not legal in international law, this could get big very quickly.
And the Iraqi's are not backing down.
Without a SOFA in place that leaves us open to charges of war crimes; prolly not something that Trump wants to see during an election year.
JTMcPhee , January 10, 2020 at 11:36 am
What percent of the presumed Trump base, and imperial Big Business and Banksters, not to mention the sloshing mass of other parts of the electorate subject to "spinning" in the Bernays Tilt-a-Whirl, would give a rat's aff about "war crimes" charges? Drone murders to date, the whole stupid of profitable (to a few, externalities ignored) GWOT, all the sh!t the CIA and CENTCOM and Very Special Ops have done with impunity against brown people and even people here at home, not anything more than squeaks from a small fraction of us.
And Trump is the Decider, yes, who signed off (as far as we know) on killing Soleimani that was lined up by the Borg, but really, how personalized to him would any repentance and disgust or even scapegoat targeting by the Blob really be, in the kayfabe that passes for "democracy in America?"
I always though de Tocqueville titled his oeuvre on the political economy he limned way back when as a neat bit of Gallic irony
xkeyscored , January 10, 2020 at 11:54 am
I don't know. Might Trump benefit from charges of war crimes, spinning them as further proof that the United Nations, International Criminal Court, etc. are controlled by commies and muslims out to get the USA?
As for the imminence of the hypothetical attacks, "There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks being plotted by Qassem Soleimani," Pompeo told the Fox News host. "We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where, but it was real."
Remember that imminent=possible at some time in the near or distant future, and
Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, "if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction -- and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time -- the United States must now act as if it were a certainty." That doctrine didn't prevent Bush's re-election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/books/20kaku.htmlshinola , January 10, 2020 at 10:19 am
The assassination was carried out by the Good Ol' USA – ipso facto it was justified.
Shiloh1 , January 10, 2020 at 12:10 pm
Declare victory and bring them all home. Leave behind W's Mission Accomplished banner and pallets of newly printed $100s with Obama's picture.
Along the lines of Bismarck, not worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Not my 20 year old, not anybody else's in my name, either, especially since this began before they were born.
And to whom will they sell their oil and natural gas? Who cares – its a fungible commodity of perhaps only of concern to our "allies" in Western Europe. Not my problem and great plan to mitigate carbon emissions!
War hawks dressed in red or blue can become mercenaries and create Go Fund Me drives to protect their investments and any particular country which they have a personal affinity or citizenship.
Synoia , January 10, 2020 at 12:13 pm
It is US election year, and much money is to be had by pandering to various piles of money.
Wacking an effective Iranian General is good news to some pile of money, and would encourage the pile of money to the Wacking party.
I see this incident as no more that the behaviors of criminal gangs.
The real question is Quo Bono. The answer appears to be the Israel Supporters giving $ to Trump.
JTMcPhee , January 10, 2020 at 12:47 pm
Lest we forget: "War is a racket."
Monty , January 10, 2020 at 2:36 pm
The whole episode reminds me of a Martin Scorsese plot line. A disagreement among "Made Men". The unfortunate symbolism and 'disrespect' of the embassy protest demanded a response, especially after all the fuss Trump made about Benghazi. Some things cannot be allowed. The Iranians, Russians and Americans probably decided between themselves what would be sufficient symbolism to prevent a war, and so Soleimani was sacrificed to die as a hero/martyr. A small price to prevent things spiraling out of control. The Iranian response seems to add weight to this hypothesis.
Rosario , January 10, 2020 at 12:54 pm
Forgive me for taking this a little more in the direction of theory, but can the rest of the world justify the assassination of CIA/Pentagon/CENTCOM officials in a similar manner given the opportunity? Are these organizations not an analog to Quds? That seems to be more in line with the type of questions we need to be asking ourselves as US citizens in a multi-polar world. This article, despite its best intentions, still hints at an American exceptionalism that no longer exists in the international mind. The US could barely get away with its BS in the 90s, it definitely can't in 2020.
The US no longer has the monopoly on the narrative ("Big Lie") rationalizing its actions, not to say the other countries have the correct narrative, just that, there are a whole bunch of narratives ("Lies") out there being told to the world by various powers that are not the US, and the US is having a difficult time holding on to the mic. The sensible route would be to figure out how to assert cultural and political values/power in this world without the mafiosi methods. Maybe some old fashioned (if not icky, cynical) diplomacy. It is better than spilled blood, or nuclear war.
The US military/intelligence wonks overplayed their hand with Soleimani. I think the Neo-Cons gave Trump a death warrant for Soleimani, and Trump was too self-involved (stupid) to know or care who he was offing. His reaction to the blow back betrays that.
Now he is f*****, along with the chicken-hawks, and they all know it. They just have to sit back and watch Iran bomb US bases because the alternative is a potential big war, possibly involving China and Russia, that can't be fought by our Islamist foreign legions. It'll demand the involvement of US troops on the ground and the US electorate won't tolerate it.
Ashburn , January 10, 2020 at 12:57 pm
Anyone who has worked in the counter-terrorism field knows that when a credible and imminent threat is received the first act is to devise a response to counter the threat. It may involve raising security measures at an airline security checkpoint, it may involve arrests, if possible, of the would-be terrorist(s). It may involve evacuating a building and conducting a search for a bomb. It may involve changing a scheduled appearance or route of travel of a VIP.
The point is to stop the operators behind the threat from completing their terrorist act. What it certainly does NOT involve is assassinating someone who may have given the order but is definitely not involved in carrying out the act. Such an assassination would not only be ineffective in countering the threat but would likely be seen as increasing the motivation behind the attack. Such was the assassination of Soleimani, even if one believes in the alleged imminent threat. This was simply a revenge killing due to Soleimani's success at organizing the opposition to US occupation.
David in Santa Cruz , January 10, 2020 at 1:08 pm
We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where, but it was real.
How does this meet the internationally recognized legal requirement of "imminent" danger to human life required to kill a political or military leader outside of a declared war? All public statements by the U.S. political and military leadership point to a retaliatory killing, at best, with a vague overlay of preemptive action.
If you agree that the "Bethlehem Doctrine" has never been recognized by the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, or the legislatures of the three rogue states who have adopted it, the assassination of Suleimani appears to have been a murder.
This is absolutely chilling. These "End Times/Armageddon" lunatics want to destroy the world. Who would Jesus have murdered? They stand the lessons of his state-sanctioned murder on their heads
xkeyscored , January 10, 2020 at 1:13 pm
Mintpress has an interesting article: Study Finds Bots and MAGA Supporters Pushing #IraniansDetestSoleimani Hashtag
A social media disinformation expert studied 60,000 tweets from nearly 10,000 accounts using the hashtag #IraniansDetestSoleimani and found that the most common phrases in those users' biographies were "Make America Great Again" and "Trump."
https://www.mintpressnews.com/study-bots-maga-supporters-iraniansdetestsoleimani-hashtag/264024/Monty , January 10, 2020 at 2:37 pm
Shocking! /s
Tom Bradford , January 10, 2020 at 1:56 pm
My two-pennyworth? The US press and the circles surrounding Trump are already crowing that he 'won' the exchange. If, as speculated, he went against military advice in ordering this assassination, his 'victory' will only confirm his illusions that he is a military genius, which makes him even more dangerous. There are some rather nasty parallels with the rise of Hitler appearing here.
mauisurfer , January 10, 2020 at 2:03 pm
The claim that Soleimani had killed hundreds of Americans was repeated, word for word, in many articles in the papers of record (e.g., New York Times, 1/7/20; Washington Post, 1/3/20, 1/3/20) as well as across the media (e.g., Boston Globe, 1/3/20; Fox News, 1/6/20; The Hill, 1/7/20).
These "hundreds of Americans" were US forces killed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) during the Iraq War, supposedly made in Iran and planted by Iranian-backed Shia militias. As professor Stephen Zunes pointed out in the Progressive (1/7/20), the Pentagon provided no evidence that Iran made the IEDs, other than the far-fetched claim that they were too sophisticated to be made in Iraq -- even though the US invasion had been justified by claims that Iraq had an incredibly threatening WMD program. The made-in-Iran claim, in turn, was the main basis for pinning responsibility for IED attacks on Shia militias -- which were, in any case, sanctioned by the Iraqi government, making Baghdad more answerable for their actions than anyone in Tehran. Last year, Gareth Porter reported in Truthout, (7/9/19) that the claim that Iran was behind the deaths of US troops was part of Vice President Dick Cheney's plan to build a case for yet another war.
J7915 , January 10, 2020 at 8:47 pm
IIRC the "sophistication claim" was made years ago. Apparently the basic technology is applied in oilfields to pierce oil well lining tubes at the oil layer. So the Iraqis knew all about the basic technique, only needed some more information.
Bill Carson , January 10, 2020 at 2:21 pm
About those "603 American deaths" that Soleimani is posthumously being charged with .
"I cross-checked a Pentagon casualty database with obituaries and not 1 of the 9 American servicemen killed fighting in Iraq since 2011 died at the hands of militias backed by Suleimani. His assassination was about revenge and provocation, not self-defense."
mauisurfer , January 10, 2020 at 2:24 pm
Larry Johnson:
"The U.S. Government and almost all of the media continue to declare that Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism. That is not true. That is a lie. I realize that calling this assertion a lie opens me to accusations of being an apologist for Iran. But simply look at the facts."
"The Trump Administration needs to stop with its infantile ranting and railing about Iran and terrorism. The actual issues surrounding Iran's growing influence in the region have little to do with terrorism. Our policies and actions towards Iran are accelerating their cooperation with China and Russia, not diminishing it. I do not think that serves the longterm interests of the United States or our allies in the Middle East"read whole story here:
Bill Carson , January 10, 2020 at 2:24 pm
Also this -- -
"On the night the US killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, it tried to kill another senior Iranian military official in Yemen, two sources say"
Somebody's got some 'splainin' to do.
xkeyscored , January 10, 2020 at 4:00 pm
Thank you, Bill.
The strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, a financier and key commander of Iran's elite Quds Force who has been active in Yemen, did not result in his death, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The unsuccessful operation may indicate that the Trump administration's killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani last week was part of a broader operation than previously explained, raising questions about whether the mission was designed to cripple the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or solely to prevent an imminent attack on Americans as originally stated.
sierra7 , January 10, 2020 at 2:29 pm
"Justification"????? You're kidding right? "They", those who we firstly "embrace" for our own interests are "for us" until we decide we are "against them"! What a farce our foreign policies are!
For some "exceptional" reason we don't recognize international law! We are the terrorists not them.
rjs , January 10, 2020 at 7:09 pm
NB: the comment i had removed from this post is now posted on a copy of the same post at Angry Bear
oaf , January 10, 2020 at 7:23 pm
the more that is at stake, the less one should listen to advisers
Jack Parsons , January 10, 2020 at 8:25 pm
Prediction for this stupidest of all worlds: Iraq really does boot us out, T-bone siezes on this for its obvious popularity among his base, and uses "He Kept Us Out Of War" for re-election.
Shiloh1 , January 11, 2020 at 10:37 am
Feature, not bug.
Where is my peace dividend after fall of Berlin Wall and Soviet Union?
Poppy and MIC wouldn't have it, hence April Galaspie's "no instructions" response to Saddam's initial inquiry over the Iraq / Kuwait surveying and mineral rights dispute on Kuwait's drilling at the border 30 years ago.
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Dec 19, 2019 | www.unz.com
renfro December 19, 2019 at 6:23 am GMT 2,600 Words
Tucker could have done a number on Trump friend Schwarzman too.Mark my words you're gonna have another melt down now that all the people who lost their home and ended up in rentals stop paying their rent that is now 2 1/2 times what their mortgage was.
This is another fake bubble being securitized and sold off. Just like putting people into houses with ARMs who couldnt afford them when the rates went up, Scharzman will fill up his rentals to 99% occupancy with special deals to sell them to investors, when the special deal period runs out and the rent goes up people will move out looking for cheaper housing and the securities wont be worth shit.Blackstone Group , CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman Buys Houses in Bulk to Profit from Mortgage Crisis
https://corpwatch.org/article/blackstone-group-buys-houses-bulk-profit-mortgage-crisis
You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation's impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing.
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.
Wall Street's foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It's going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it's devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up -- again.Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, a major private equity firm. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.
In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That's a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.
Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it's the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation -- and of a whole lot of other things, too. It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael's, Orangina, and dozens of other companies.
Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission annual filing. It's also a public company with a list of institutional owners that reads like a who's who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an unprecedented $13 billion fine.
In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these other Wall Street banks -- generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place -- make money too.
An All-Cash Goliath
In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn't have to know what Blackstone was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.
Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast -- up 20 percent between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of whack.
The second sign was the buyers themselves.
"I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn't for lack of trying," says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers -- every last one of them -- were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.
Between 2005 and 2009, the mortgage crisis, fueled by racially discriminatory lending practices, destroyed 53 percent of African American wealth and 66 percent of Hispanic wealth, figures that stagger the imagination. As a result, it's safe to say that few blacks or Hispanics today are buying homes outright, in cash. Blackstone, on the other hand, doesn't have a problem fronting the money, given its $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank. This money has allowed it to outbid families who have to secure traditional financing. It's also paved the way for the company to purchase a lot of homes very quickly, shocking local markets and driving prices up in a way that pushes even more families out of the game.
"You can't compete with a company that's betting on speculative future value when they're playing with cash," says Alston. "It's almost like they planned this."
In hindsight, it's clear that the Great Recession fueled a terrific wealth and asset transfer away from ordinary Americans and to financial institutions. During that crisis, Americans lost trillions of dollars of household wealth when housing prices crashed, while banks seized about five million homes. But what's just beginning to emerge is how, as in the recession years, the recovery itself continues to drive the process of transferring wealth and power from the bottom to the top.
From 2009-2012, the top 1 percent of Americans captured 95 percent of income gains. Now, as the housing market rebounds, billions of dollars in recovered housing wealth are flowing straight to Wall Street instead of to families and communities. Since spring 2012, just at the time when Blackstone began buying foreclosed homes in bulk, an estimated $88 billion of housing wealth accumulation has gone straight to banks or institutional investors as a result of their residential property holdings, according to an analysis by TomDispatch. And it's a number that's likely to just keep growing.
"Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities," says Henry Wade, founder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.
But buying homes cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate in value isn't the only way Blackstone is making money on this deal. It wants your rental payment, too.
Securitizing Rentals
Wall Street's rental empire is entirely new. The single-family rental industry used to be the bailiwick of small-time mom-and-pop operations. But what makes this moment unprecedented is the financial alchemy that Blackstone added. In November, after many months of hype, Blackstone released history's first rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. And once investors tripped over themselves in a rush to get it, Blackstone's competitors announced that they, too, would develop similar securities as soon as possible.
Depending on whom you ask, the idea of bundling rental payments and selling them off to investors is either a natural evolution of the finance industry or a fire-breathing chimera.
"This is a new frontier," comments Ted Weinstein, a consultant in the real-estate-owned homes industry for 30 years. "It's something I never really would have dreamt of."
However, to anyone who went through the 2008 mortgage-backed-security crisis, this new territory will sound strangely familiar.
"It's just like a residential mortgage-backed security," said one hedge-fund investor whose company does business with Blackstone. When asked why the public should expect these securities to be safe, given the fact that risky mortgage-backed securities caused the 2008 collapse, he responded, "Trust me."
For Blackstone, at least, the logic is simple. The company wants money upfront to purchase more cheap, foreclosed homes before prices rise. So it's joined forces with JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank to bundle the rental payments of 3,207 single-family houses and sell this bond to investors with mortgages on the underlying houses offered as collateral. This is, of course, just a test case for what could become a whole new industry of rental-backed securities.
Many major Wall Street banks are involved in the deal, according to a copy of the private pitch documents Blackstone sent to potential investors on October 31st, which was reviewed by TomDispatch. Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are helping market the bond. Wells Fargo is the certificate administrator. Midland Loan Services, a subsidiary of PNC Bank, is the loan servicer. (By the way, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank are all members of another clique: the list of banks foreclosing on the most families in 2013.)
According to interviews with economists, industry insiders, and housing activists, people are more or less holding their collective breath, hoping that what looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck won't crash the economy the same way the last flock of ducks did.
"You kind of just hope they know what they're doing," says Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "That they have provisions for turnover and vacancies. But have they done that? Have they taken the appropriate care? I certainly wouldn't count on it." The cash flow analysis in the documents sent to investors assumes that 95 percent of these homes will be rented at all times, at an average monthly rent of $1,312. It's an occupancy rate that real estate professionals describe as ambitious.
There's one significant way, however, in which this kind of security differs from its mortgage-backed counterpart. When banks repossess mortgaged homes as collateral, there is at least the assumption (often incorrect due to botched or falsified paperwork from the banks) that the homeowner has, indeed, defaulted on her mortgage. In this case, however, if a single home-rental bond blows up, thousands of families could be evicted, whether or not they ever missed a single rental payment.
"We could well end up in that situation where you get a lot of people getting evicted not because the tenants have fallen behind but because the landlords have fallen behind," says Baker.
Bugs in Blackstone's Housing Dreams
Whether these new securities are safe may boil down to the simple question of whether Blackstone proves to be a good property manager. Decent management practices will ensure high occupancy rates, predictable turnover, and increased investor confidence. Bad management will create complaints, investigations, and vacancies, all of which will increase the likelihood that Blackstone won't have the cash flow to pay investors back.
If you ask CaDonna Porter, a tenant in one of Blackstone's Invitation Homes properties in a suburb outside Atlanta, property management is exactly the skill that Blackstone lacks. "If I could shorten my lease -- I signed a two-year lease -- I definitely would," says Porter.
The cockroaches and fat water bugs were the first problem in the Invitation Homes rental that she and her children moved into in September. Porter repeatedly filed online maintenance requests that were canceled without anyone coming to investigate the infestation. She called the company's repairs hotline. No one answered.
The second problem arrived in an email with the subject line marked "URGENT." Invitation Homes had failed to withdraw part of Porter's November payment from her bank account, prompting the company to demand that she deliver the remaining payment in person, via certified funds, by five p.m. the following day or incur "the additional legal fee of $200 and dispossessory," according to email correspondences reviewed by TomDispatch.
Porter took off from work to deliver the money order in person, only to receive an email saying that the payment had been rejected because it didn't include the $200 late fee and an additional $75 insufficient funds fee. What followed were a maddening string of emails that recall the fraught and often fraudulent interactions between homeowners and mortgage-servicing companies. Invitation Homes repeatedly threatened to file for eviction unless Porter paid various penalty fees. She repeatedly asked the company to simply accept her month's payment and leave her alone.
"I felt really harassed. I felt it was very unjust," says Porter. She ultimately wrote that she would seek legal counsel, which caused Invitation Homes to immediately agree to accept the payment as "a one-time courtesy."
Porter is still frustrated by the experience -- and by the continued presence of the cockroaches. ("I put in another request today about the bugs, which will probably be canceled again.")
A recent Huffington Post investigation and dozens of online reviews written by Invitation Homes tenants echo Porter's frustrations. Many said maintenance requests went unanswered, while others complained that their spiffed-up houses actually had underlying structural issues.
There's also at least one documented case of Blackstone moving into murkier legal territory. This fall, the Orlando, Florida, branch of Invitation Homes appeared to mail forged eviction notices to a homeowner named Francisco Molina, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Delivered in letter-sized manila envelopes, the fake notices claimed that an eviction had been filed against Molina in court, although the city confirmed otherwise. The kicker is that Invitation Homes didn't even have the right to evict Molina, legally or otherwise. Blackstone's purchase of the house had been reversed months earlier, but the company had lost track of that information.
The Great Recession of 2016?
These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone's underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you're out.
Although Blackstone has issued only one rental-payment security so far, it already seems to be putting this strict protocol into place. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the company has filed eviction proceedings against a full 10 percent of its renters, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.
About 9 percent of Blackstone's properties, approximately 3,600 houses, are located in the Phoenix metro area. Most are in low- to middle-income neighborhoods.
Forty thousand homes add up to only a small percentage of the total national housing stock. Yet in the cities Blackstone has targeted most aggressively, the concentration of its properties is staggering. In Phoenix, Arizona, some neighborhoods have at least one, if not two or three, Blackstone-owned homes on just about every block.
This inundation has some concerned that the private equity giant, perhaps in conjunction with other institutional investors, will exercise undue influence over regional markets, pushing up rental prices because of a lack of competition. The biggest concern among many ordinary Americans, however, should be that, not too many years from now, this whole rental empire and its hot new class of securities might fail, sending the economy into an all-too-familiar tailspin.
"You're allowing Wall Street to control a significant sector of single-family housing," said Michael Donley, a resident of Chicago who has been investigating Blackstone's rapidly expanding presence in his neighborhood. "But is it sustainable?" he wondered. "It could all collapse in 2016, and you'll be worse off than in 2008."
Rebel0007 , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:39 am GMT
This is not surprising that this has happened. All of the de-regulation on Wall Street, lobbied for by Wall Street has allowed this to transpire.sally , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:18 am GMTCongress does not even read the bills that they sign into law, let alone write them! Many are written by ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the Realtor's assosiation, the Medical Industrial Complex, public employee unions, and various other special interest groups!
Why is it a pressing issue to actively promote homosexuality? What is the point? That is really strange! There is a difference between not actively discriminating and actively promoting!
Are they trying to worsen the AIDS epidemic or lower the birth rate? It does not make sense to be actively promoting and encouraging homosexuality.
@Colin Wright There are many venture capitalist that are not Jewish.. Venture Capitalist don't always advertise their wealth. Not everybody in Wall Street or the City of London is Jewish.mark green , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:23 am GMTI think it is important to separate the Jews from the Zionist , many in that small group (Zionist) are Jewish and Christian but most Jews and most Christians are neither Venture Capitalist nor Zionist. Time after time I have asked my Jewish friends are you are Zionist, and most say they do not really know what Zionism is? Zionism hosts many races among its members; in the states, Christian Zionism is big, maybe bigger even than Jewish Zionism.. see Christian Zionism : The Tragedy and the Turning: the cause of our Conflicts (on DVD) by http://www.Whit.org. .
Zionism is an economic system. Zionism is a winner take all system of Economics . Zionism is like an adult version of the game called King of the Mountain. In such a game, no one is allowed to play unless they first have sufficient resources to be counted, and are then willing to and believe they are personally capable of defeating the then residing well armed king (Oligarch). IMO, all Jews everywhere, would be well advised to avoid being labelled a Zionist<=hence the reason ?
Zionism is not the same as Judaism, its not a race, its not a religion, its not even a culture, it is an economic system with virus like attributes.
@Lot You are quibbling. You are prevaricating. You are obfuscating.Rebel0007 , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:28 am GMTJoyce has assembled a powerful case against a known cast of financial parasites. This phenomena is hardly new. It brings to mind another financial scandal of a generation ago that was chronicled in James B. Stewart's book 'Den of Thieves'.
The mega-wealthy swindlers of that era were also all Jews: Boesky, Siegel, Levine, Milken, among others. Some twenty years later, another Wall Street Jew, Bernie Madoff, succeeds in pulling off the biggest fraud in US history. There's a pattern here.
Yet all you can do, Lot, is deflect, denigrate, and deny.
Joyce is giving us more actual names. These are the actual perps as well as institutions they hide behind. These ruthless predators collude with one another as they exploit the labor of millions of gentiles worldwide, then shower Jewish causes and philanthropies with their loot. Their tribal avarice is revolting. And insatiable.
Do you deny this phenomena?
Is it all just another 'anti-Semitic canard'?
You even claim [Joyce] is
"retarded and highly uninformed".
Retarded?
He's brilliant and persuasive.
Uninformed?
He's erudite and scholarly.
You, Lot, are demonstrating again devious tribal dishonesty. It's glaring, it's shameful, and it's obvious. This is a trait I've observed in virtually all of your writings. You invariably deflect and deny. But Jewish criminality is real.
Joyce aptly concludes:
[T]he prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites.
So true. So tragically true.
This is a Jewish conspiracy to make Jews look terrible. Congress should slam the breaks here. The de-regulation of the powerful combined with the over-regulation of the powerless is criminally wreckless. Kind of like the friends don't let friends drive drunk approach.HammerJack , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:30 am GMTCongress slam the breaks, yeah right, that'll happen! Lol!
This won't end well.
@Colin Wright Andrew Carnegie left behind institutions like Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University, and over 2500 Free Libraries from coast to coast, in a time when very little was done to help what we now call the "underprivileged".PetrOldSack , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:16 am GMTIn fact, he gave away 90% of his massive fortune–about $75 Billion in current dollars. Funding, in the process, many charities, hospitals, museums, foundations and institutions of learning. He was a major benefactor of negro education.
He was a staunch anti-imperialist who believed America should concentrate its energies on peaceful endeavors rather than conquering and subduing far-off lands.
Although they are even more keen to put their names on things, today's robber barons leave behind mainly wreckage.
@anon "Crowing on a pile of dung", global in scope, local and exclusive to thier own.Ghali , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:46 am GMTJews are destroying the world. Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins. Look at Europe, Africa and the Americas, Jews have left their ugly footprints. Corruption, prostitution, drugs and human trafficking are their trade.Just passing through , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:56 am GMT@anon A combination of both I would say, although some would like to make it out that Anglo-Saxons were the epitome of honour, they too resorted to morallly abject tricks and swindles to acquire their wealth.Sean , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:44 am GMTWASPs allowed Jews into their lands and both of them struck a sort of implicit contract to work together to loot the world, when the word had been sucked dry, the conflict between Jews and WASPs began and Hitler and the National Socialists were a last gasp attempt to save the WASP side from being beaten, in the end higher Jewish verbal IQ gave them the upper edge in the ability to trick people.
It is hard to feel sorry for WASPs, they struck a deal with the Jews centuries ago to work together and were backstabbed, what is happening to these Third World countries will now happen to WASP countries, it is poetic justice. Luckily the torch of civilisation will continue by way of East Asia and Eastern Europe, who were true conservatives in that all they wished was prosperity for their people in their own lands without any aggressive foreign policy moves.
Basically, WASPs thought that they could win in the end, but they were out Jew'd and now they are crying.
The one difference you will notice is that certain subsections of WASPs, notable the British, actually did build infrastructure in the countries they looted, this to me was borne out of a sense of guilt, so to be fair, WASPs were not as parasitic and ruthless as Jews.
But in the end, the more ruthless wins. To quote the JokerYou get what you fucking deserve
@Lot Kyle Bass's fund is called 'Hayman', maybe because the MSM loathe the Bass family that fellow Texican Bass is not related to. They are not the only ones aware of the drawbacks of a name. Elliot is Singer's middle one.silviosilver , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:48 am GMTThe article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private equity and distressed debt funds
If someone owes you money and you cannot collect, you factor the account, (sell it on) and then people who are going to be a lot less pleasant about it will pay them a visit and have a 'talk' with them. While it is good to have a domestic bankruptcy regime in which innovation and entrepreneurship is encouraged– to the extent that people are not routinely gaming the system–I don't see why Argentina should benefit. Singer became notorious for what he did to Argentina after he bought their debt, and he is pretty upfront about not caring who objects. Puerto Rico is neither foreign or protected by Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code so it is a borderline case, which is probably why the people collecting that debt tried to hide who they were.
The way he took down Jonathan Bush and others led to Bloomberg dubbing Singer 'The World's Most Feared Investor'. Singer buys into companies where he sees the management as as failing to deliver maximum value to the shareholders, then applies pressure to raise the share price (in Bush's case extremely personal pressure) that often leads to the departure of the CEO and sale of the company. That immediate extra value for the shareholder Singer creates puts lots of working people out a job. Because of Singer and his imitators, CEO's are outsourcing and importing replacements for indigenous workers in those services that cannot be outsourced. All the while loath to foster innovation that could bring about long term growth, because that would interfere with squeezing out more and more shareholder value.
Singer is less like a vulture than a rogue elephant that is killing the breeding pair white rhinos on a game reserve, and they are going extinct. Well it's a good thing! Thanks to Singer et al (including Warren Buffett) Trump got elected. According to someone in jail with Epstein, he had an anecdote about Trump being asked by a French girl what 'white trash' was, and Trump replied 'It's me without the money'.
Trump is now essentially funded by three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250 million in pro-Trump political money. In return, they want war with Iran.
All to the good. Iran won't leave Saudi Arabia (serious money) alone so Iran is going to have to be crushed as a threat to the Saud family like Saddam before it anyway. If the Jews think they are causing it, let 'em think so.
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/trump-creates-a-new-nation/
When the Israelis occupy nearly all of the West Bank with Donald Trump's approval and start "relocating" the existing population, who will be around to speak up? No one, as by that time saying nay to Israel will be a full-fledged hate crime and you can go to jail for doing soLoudspeaker goes off " All Anti–Zionist Jews to Times Square ".
@Colin Wright No judeophile, but it's 90% demagogic horsehit.J Adelman , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:53 am GMTGod forbid anybody should ever have to pay back money they borrow! Why, that's utterly Jewish!
These so-called "vulture" funds didn't originate the debt. They simply purchased already existing debt at deeply discounted prices either because the debt was already in default or was at imminent risk of defaulting, which is why the debt sells at a heavy discount, since existing debt holders are often happy to sell cheap and get something rather than hold on and risk getting nothing.
What Joyce zeroes in on is these vulture funds' willingness to use all legal avenues to force debtors to make good on their debts, including seizing the collateral the debtors pledged when they borrowed the money. Joyce chooses to characterize this practice as "Jewish," implying that gentile creditors would instead be overcome with compassion and let the debtors off the hook and wear the loss themselves.
What Joyce regards as a defect of "vulture" funds, others might regard as an benefit. The size of these funds, their legal expertise, and their political connections mean that borrowers can more successfully be held to account. If I owned, say, Puerto Rican debt in my retirement account, the chances that I could make Puerto Rico honor its obligations are much slimmer.
None of this is to suggest that finance, as we today know it, is perfect and that it couldn't be reformed in any way to make its operation more conducive to nationalistic social values, only that anti-cap ideologues like Joyce weave lurid tales of malfeasance out of completely humdrum market economics (which is precisely the same market economics that Tucker Carlson learned about too, btw).
Mr. Joyce
Your obsession with us will prove to be your downfall.
Jewish people have always stood against tyranny against the working class, the poor and other people of color.
The phrases and catch words that you used to vilify Jews are in many cases pulled from the age old tropes used to demonize Jews for centuries and are anti-Semitic through and through. They can't be overlooked nor hidden by claims of legitimate political disagreements.
We know that it is not only the Jewish community that is at risk from unchecked antisemitism, but also other communities that white nationalists target.
I find it very offensive that people like you continue to demonize us for no reason.I dare you to hold a debate with me on this so called "Jewish Influence".
I am not even hiding my name here.
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Jan 09, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
We're told that getting ahead at work and reorienting our lives around our jobs will make us happy. So why hasn't it? Many of those who work in the corporate world are constantly peppered with questions about their " career progression ." The Internet is saturated with articles providing tips and tricks on how to develop a never-fail game plan for professional development. Millions of Americans are engaged in a never-ending cycle of résumé-padding that mimics the accumulation of Boy Scout merit badges or A's on report cards except we never seem to get our Eagle Scout certificates or academic diplomas. We're told to just keep going until we run out of gas or reach retirement, at which point we fade into the peripheral oblivion of retirement communities, morning tee-times, and long midweek lunches at beach restaurants.
The idealistic Chris McCandless in Jon Krakauer's bestselling book Into the Wild defiantly declares, "I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one." Anyone who has spent enough time in the career hamster wheel can relate to this sentiment. Is 21st-century careerism -- with its promotion cycles, yearly feedback, and little wooden plaques commemorating our accomplishments -- really the summit of human existence, the paramount paradigm of human flourishing?
Michael J. Noughton, director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, and board chair for Reel Precision Manufacturing, doesn't think so. In his Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World , Noughton provides a sobering statistic: approximately two thirds of employees in the United States are "either indifferent or hostile to their work." That's not just an indicator of professional dissatisfaction; it's economically disastrous. The same survey estimates that employee disengagement is costing the U.S. economy "somewhere between 450-550 billion dollars annually."
The origin of this problem, says Naughton, is an error in how Americans conceive of work and leisure. We seem to err in one of two ways. One is to label our work as strictly a job, a nine-to-five that pays the bills. In this paradigm, leisure is an amusement, an escape from the drudgery of boring, purposeless labor. The other way is that we label our work as a career that provides the essential fulfillment in our lives. Through this lens, leisure is a utility, simply another means to serve our work. Outside of work, we exercise to maintain our health in order to work harder and longer. We read books that help maximize our utility at work and get ahead of our competitors. We "continue our education" largely to further our careers.
Whichever error we fall into, we inevitably end up dissatisfied. The more we view work as a painful, boring chore, the less effective we are at it, and the more complacent and discouraged. Our leisure activities, in turn, no matter how distracting, only compound our sadness, because no amount of games can ever satisfy our souls. Or, if we see our meaning in our work and leisure as only another means of increasing productivity, we inevitably burn out, wondering, perhaps too late in life, what exactly we were working for . As Augustine of Hippo noted, our hearts are restless for God. More recently, C.S. Lewis noted that we yearn to be fulfilled by something that nothing in this world can satisfy. We need both our work and our leisure to be oriented to the transcendent in order to give our lives meaning and purpose.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that much of the labor Americans perform isn't actually good . There are "bad goods" that are detrimental to society and human flourishing. Naughton suggests some examples: violent video games, pornography, adultery dating sites, cigarettes, high-octane alcohol, abortifacients, gambling, usury, certain types of weapons, cheat sheet websites, "gentlemen's clubs," and so on. Though not as clear-cut as the above, one might also add working for the kinds of businesses that contribute to the impoverishment or destruction of our communities, as Tucker Carlson has recently argued .
Why does this matter for professional satisfaction? Because if our work doesn't offer goods and services that contribute to our communities and the common good -- and especially if we are unable to perceive how our labor plays into that common good -- then it will fundamentally undermine our happiness. We will perceive our work primarily in a utilitarian sense, shrugging our shoulders and saying, "it's just a paycheck," ignoring or disregarding the fact that as rational animals we need to feel like our efforts matter.
Economic liberalism -- at least in its purest free-market expression -- is based on a paradigm with nominalist and utilitarian origins that promote "freedom of indifference." In rudimentary terms, this means that we need not be interested in the moral quality of our economic output. If we produce goods that satisfy people's wants, increasing their "utils," as my Econ 101 professor used to say, then we are achieving business success. In this paradigm, we desire an economy that maximizes access to free choice regardless of the content of that choice, because the more choices we have, the more we can maximize our utils, or sensory satisfaction.
The freedom of indifference paradigm is in contrast to a more ancient understanding of economic and civic engagement: a freedom for excellence. In this worldview, "we are made for something," and participation in public acts of virtue is essential both to our own well-being and that of our society. By creating goods and services that objectively benefit others and contributing to an order beyond the maximization of profit, we bless both ourselves and the polis . Alternatively, goods that increase "utils" but undermine the common good are rejected.
Returning to Naughton's distinction between work and leisure, we need to perceive the latter not as an escape from work or a means of enhancing our work, but as a true time of rest. This means uniting ourselves with the transcendent reality from which we originate and to which we will return, through prayer, meditation, and worship. By practicing this kind of true leisure, well treated in a book by Josef Pieper , we find ourselves refreshed, and discover renewed motivation and inspiration to contribute to the common good.
Americans are increasingly aware of the problems with Wall Street conservatism and globalist economics. We perceive that our post-Cold War policies are hurting our nation. Naughton's treatise on work and leisure offers the beginnings of a game plan for what might replace them.
Casey Chalk covers religion and other issues for The American Conservative and is a senior writer for Crisis Magazine. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia, and a masters in theology from Christendom College.
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Jan 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
HarryOrd , Jan 9 2020 19:06 utc | 37Hi first time commenter on here.With all that is happening in the U.S right now I can't help but think that it's past time for the people to reassert their power over the National security state, as unrealistic as that might sound.
The Anti war movement is ideologically divided between progressives and libertarian/paleoconservatives, so a political party would not likely be the answer.
Instead perhaps we should consider a grassroots movement to amend the constitution to guarantee U.S neutrality in world affairs (banning both the arming or financing of foreign belligerents) and to ban the Federal government from having a standing military force except in times of actual war. I don't know what chance either would have of actually being passed, but it might at least force a debate on these issues in a way that might resonate better with the average American. Just thought I'd throw that out there. Peace and Solidarity
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Jan 08, 2020 | t.co
Meghan McCain had to ask Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren three times to admit that Qasem Soleimani was a terrorist.
Daily Caller Jan 07, 2020 Search results
Sarah Abdallah @ sahouraxo 16h 16 hours ago More
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Just a few years ago, CNN was praising Qassem
#Soleimani for being the driving force behind the defeat of ISIS. Today they call him a "terrorist" and expect you to believe them.
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Jan 06, 2020 | www.breitbart.com
On Sunday's broadcast of CNN's "State of the Union," 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) questioned if President Donald Trump's reasons for the Qasem Soleimani assassination was to distract from impeachment.
Warren said, "I think that the question that we ought to focus on is why now? Why not a month ago, and why not a month from now? And the answer from the administration seems to be that they can't keep their story straight on this. They pointed in all different directions. And you know, the last time that we watched them do this was the summer over Ukraine. As soon as people started asking about the conversations between Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine and why aid had been held up to Ukraine, the administration did the same thing. They pointed in all directions of what was going on. And of course, what emerged then is that this is Donald Trump just trying to advance Donald Trump's own political agenda. Not the agenda of the United States of America. So what happens right now? Next week, the president of the United States could be facing an impeachment trial in the Senate. We know that he is deeply upset about that. I think that people are reasonably asking why this moment? Why does he pick now to take this highly inflammatory, highly dangerous action that moves us closer to war? We have been at war for 20 years in the Middle East, and we need to stop the war this the Middle East and not expand it."
Tapper asked, "Are you suggesting that President Trump pulled the trigger and had Qasem Soleimani killed as a distraction from impeachment?"
Warren said, "Look, I think that people are reasonably asking about the timing and why it is that the administration seems to have all kinds of different answers. In the first 48 hours after this attack, what did we hear? Well, we heard it was for an imminent attack, and then we heard, no, no, it is to prevent any future attack, and then we heard that it is from the vice president himself and no, it is related to 9/11, and then we heard from president reports of people in the intelligence community saying that the whole, that the threat was overblown. You know, when the administration doesn't seem to have a coherent answer for taking a step like this. They have taken a step that moves us closer to war, a step that puts everyone at risk, and step that puts the military at risk and puts the diplomats in the region at risk. And we have already paid a huge price for this war. Thousands of American lives lost, and a cost that we have paid domestically and around the world. At the same time, look at what it has done in the Middle East, millions of people who have been killed, who have been injured, who have been displaced. So this is not a moment when the president should be escalating tensions and moving us to war. The job of the president is to keep us safe, and that means move back from the edge."
Tapper pressed, "Do you believe that President Trump pulled the trigger on this operation as a way to distract from impeachment? Is that what you think?"
Warren said, "I think it is a reasonable question to ask, particularly when the administration immediately after having taken this decision offers a bunch of contradictory explanations for what is going on."
She continued, "I think it is the right question to ask. We will get more information as we go forward but look at the timing on this. Look at what Donald Trump has said afterward and his administration. They have pointed in multiple directions. There is a reason that he chose this moment, not a month ago and not a month from now, not a less aggressive and less dangerous response. He had a whole range of responses that were presented to him. He didn't pick one of the other ones. He picked the most aggressive and the one that moves us closer to war. So what does everybody talk about today? Are we going to war? Are we going to have another five years, tens, ten years of war in the Middle East, and dragged in once again. Are we bringing another generation of young people into war? That is every bit of the conversation right now. Donald Trump has taken an extraordinarily reckless step, and we have seen it before, he is using foreign policy and uses whatever he can to advance the interests of Donald Trump."
Follow Pam Key On Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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Jan 06, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Now is the time for Republicans of conviction to stand together.
t speaks to the state of American politics when for three years the continued defense of Donald Trump's record has been: "well, he hasn't started any new wars." Last week, however, that may have finally changed.
In the most flagrant tit-for-tat since the United States initiated its economic war against Iran in the spring of 2018, the Trump administration assassinated Major General Qasem Soleimani, who for more than 20 years has led the Iranian Quds Force. The strategic mind behind Iran's operations in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the rest of the Middle East, Soleimani's death via drone strike outside of Baghdad's airport is nothing short of a declaration of open warfare between American and Iranian-allied forces in Iraq.
While the world waits for the Islamic Republic's inevitable response, the reaction on the home front was organized in less than 36 hours. Saturday afternoon, almost 400 people gathered on the muddy grass outside the White House in Washington, D.C., joined in solidarity by simultaneous rallies in over 70 other U.S. cities.
The D.C. attendees and their co-demonstrators were expectedly progressive, but the organizers made clear they were happy to work across political barriers for the cause of peace.
"I think the more people who are prepared to stand up and say it [the assassination] is completely, not only inappropriate, not only illegal, not only unjust, but an act of war to do something like this, the better," said Nicole Rousseau with the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, which has been planning anti-war protests in D.C. since 2002.
Code Pink's Leonardo Flores, when asked what politicians he believed were on the side of the peace movement, named Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders and Republican Senator Rand Paul. "I don't think peace should be a left and right issue," he said. "I think it's an issue we can all rally around. It's very clear too much of our money is going to foreign wars that don't benefit the American people and we could be using that money in many different ways, giving it back to the American people, whether it's investing in social spending or giving direct tax cuts."
This is the moment, as Donald Trump embraces the neoconservative dream of war with Iran, that the Republican base must stand on their hind legs, lock arms with their progressive allies, and say no .
It's happened before. In 2013, when the Obama administration was ready for regime change in Syria, Americans, both left and right, made clear they didn't want to see their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters die so the American government could install the likes of Abu Mohammed al-Julani in Damascus.
Of course, it was much easier for Republicans to stand up to a Democratic president going to war. "It's been really unfortunate that so much of politics now is driven on a partisan basis," opined Eric Garris, director and co-founder of Antiwar.com, in an interview with TAC . "Whether you're for or against war and how strongly you might be against war is driven by partisan points of view."
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the movement that saw millions march against George W. Bush's war in Iraq disappeared overnight (excluding a handful of stalwart organizations like Code Pink). Non-interventionist Republicans can't repeat that mistake. They have to show that if an American president wants to start an unconstitutional, immoral war, it's the principle that matters, not the R or D next to their names.
Garris said the reason Antiwar.com was founded in 1995 was to bridge this partisan divide by putting people like Daniel Ellsberg and Pat Buchanan side by side for the same cause. "These coalitions are only effective if you try to bring in a broad coalition of people," he said. "I want to see rallies of thousands of people in Omaha, Nebraska, and things like that, where they're reaching out to middle America and to the people that are actually going to reach the unconverted."
The right is in the best position it's been in decades to accomplish this. "I don't know if you saw Tucker Carlson Tonight , but it was quite amazing to watch that kind of antiwar sentiment on Fox News," Garris said. "You would not have seen [that] in recent history. And certainly the emergence of The American Conservative magazine has been a really strong signal and leader in terms of bringing about the values of the Old Right like non-interventionism to a conservative audience."
This also includes the core antiwar members of Congress, all of whom are Republican , and new conservative veterans groups like Bring Our Troops Home .
It's the anti-war right, in the Republican tradition of La Follette, Taft, Paul, and Buchanan, that has the power to stop middle America from following Trump into a conflict with Iran. But it's both sides, working together as Americans, that can finally end the endless wars.
Hunter DeRensis is a reporter with The National Interest and a regular contributor to The American Conservative. Follow him on Twitter @HunterDeRensis .
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Jan 06, 2020 | www.youtube.com
Richie Beck , 6 hours ago (edited)
Bob Bart , 7 hours ago (edited)"When everyone else is losing their heads, it is important to keep yours." - Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France and Irony.
personal cooking , 4 hours ago" What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party. " ~ Henry David Thoreau
China is laughing.US pay attention in middel east now.
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Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com
KA , says: Show Comment January 5, 2020 at 8:57 pm GMT
@Just passing through https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/04/media/fox-news-iran-soleimani/index.htmlTucker Carlson is livid with anger and frustration at Trump's actions .
Death to America is a rallying point for Iran to emphasize the same aspect of American status .
They talk in future . Carlson is reminding that we are already there .If people woke up with anger at Iran., they would find that the dead horse isn't able to do much but only can attract a lot of attention from far .
The reason Taliban didn't inform Mulla Omar's death was to let the rank and file continues to remain engaged without getting into internal feuding fight .
A trues state of US won't be televised until the horse starts rotting but then that would be quite late .I don't recall any dissent until this assassination . Now 70 cities are witnessing protests and a few in Media are not happy at all .
There is a big unknown if and when Iran would strike back and at who. Persian is not like khasaogi murderer or Harri kidnapper .
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Jan 05, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
Getting rid of Trump means taking seriously "shit-life syndrome" -- and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities.
My state of Ohio is home to many shit-life syndrome sufferers. In the 2016 presidential election , Hillary Clinton lost Ohio's 18 electoral votes to Trump. She got clobbered by over 400,000 votes (more than 8%). She lost 80 of Ohio's 88 counties. Trump won rural poorer counties, several by whopping margins. Trump got the shit-life syndrome vote.
Will Hutton in his 2018 Guardian piece, " The Bad News is We're Dying Early in Britain – and It's All Down to 'Shit-Life Syndrome '" describes shit-life syndrome in both Britain and the United States: "Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security."
The Brookings Institution, in November 2019, reported : "53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64 -- accounting for 44% of all workers -- qualify as 'low-wage.' Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000."
For most of these low-wage workers, Hutton notes: "Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer."
Shit-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians -- pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan.
The Cincinnati Enquirer , in November 2019, ran the story: " Suicide Rate Up 45% in Ohio in Last 11 Years, With a Sharper Spike among the Young ." In Ohio between 2007 and 2018, the rate of suicide among people 10 to 24 has risen by 56%. The Ohio Department of Health reported that suicide is the leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 10‐14 and the second leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 15‐34, with the suicide rate higher in poorer, rural counties.
Overall in the United States, "Suicides have increased most sharply in rural communities, where loss of farming and manufacturing jobs has led to economic declines over the past quarter century," reports the American Psychological Association. The U.S. suicide rate has risen 33% from 1999 through 2017 (from 10.5 to 14 suicides per 100,000 people).
In addition to an increasing rate of suicide, drug overdose deaths rose in the United States from 16,849 in 1999 to 70,237 in 2017, more sharply increasing in recent years . The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that opioids -- mainly synthetic opioids -- were involved in 47,600 overdose deaths in 2017 (67.8% of all drug overdose deaths).
Among all states in 2017, Ohio had the second highest rate of drug overdose death (46.3 per 100,000). West Virginia had the highest rate (57.8 per 100,000).
"In 2016, Donald Trump captured 68 percent of the vote in West Virginia, a state hit hard by opioid overdoses," begins the 2018 NPR story: " Analysis Finds Geographic Overlap In Opioid Use And Trump Support In 2016 ."
The NPR story was about a study published in JAMA Network Open titled " Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016 ," lead authored by physician James Goodwin. In counties with high rates of opioid use, Trump received 60% of the vote; but Trump received only 39% of the vote in counties with low opioid use. Opioid use is prevalent in poor rural counties, as Goodwin reports in his study: "Approximately two-thirds of the association between opioid rates and presidential voting was explained by socioeconomic variables."
Goodwin told NPR: "It very well may be that if you're in a county that is dissolving because of opioids, you're looking around and you're seeing ruin. That can lead to a sense of despair . . . . You want something different. You want radical change."
Shit-life syndrome sufferers are looking for immediate change, and are receptive to unconventional politicians.
In 2016, Trump understood that being unconventional, including unconventional obnoxiousness, can help ratings. So he began his campaign with unconventional serial humiliations of his fellow Republican candidates to get the nomination; and since then, his unconventionality has been limited only by his lack of creativity -- relying mostly on the Roy Cohn modeled "Punch them harder than they punch you" for anyone who disagrees with him.
I talked to Trump voters in 2016, and many of them felt that Trump was not a nice person, even a jerk, but their fantasy was that he was one of those rich guys with a big ego who needed to be a hero. Progressives who merely mock this way of thinking rather than create a strategy to deal with it are going to get four more years of Trump.
The Dems' problem in getting the shit-life syndrome vote in 2020 is that none of their potential nominees for president are unconventional. In 2016, Bernie Sanders achieved some degree of unconventionality. His young Sandernistas loved the idea of a curmudgeon grandfather/eccentric uncle who boldly proclaimed in Brooklynese that he was a "socialist," and his fans marveled that he was no loser, having in fact charmed Vermonters into electing him to the U.S. Senate. Moreover, during the 2016 primaries, there were folks here in Ohio who ultimately voted for Trump but who told me that they liked Bernie -- both Sanders and Trump appeared unconventional to them.
While Bernie still has fans in 2020, he has done major damage to his "unconventionality brand." By backing Hillary Clinton in 2016, he resembled every other cowardly politician. I felt sorry for his Sandernistas, heartbroken after their hero Bernie -- who for most of his political life had self-identified as an "independent" and a "socialist" -- became a compliant team player for the corporatist Blue Team that he had spent a career claiming independence from. If Bernie was terrified in 2016 of risking Ralph Nader's fate of ostracism for defying the corporatist Blue Team, would he really risk assassination for defying the rich bastards who own the United States?
So in 2020, this leaves realistic Dems with one strategy. While the Dems cannot provide a candidate who can viscerally connect with shit-life syndrome sufferers, the Dems can show these victims that they have been used and betrayed by Trump.
Here in Ohio in counties dominated by shit-life syndrome, the Dems would be wise not to focus on their candidate but instead pour money into negative advertising, shaming Trump for making promises that he knew he wouldn't deliver on: Hillary has not been prosecuted; Mexico has paid for no wall; great manufacturing jobs are not going to Ohioans ; and most importantly, in their communities, there are now even more suicides, drug overdose deaths, and grieving families.
You would think a Hollywood Dem could viscerally communicate in 30 seconds: "You fantasized that this braggart would be your hero, but you discovered he's just another rich asshole politician out for himself." This strategy will not necessarily get Dems the shit-life syndrome vote, but will increase the likelihood that these folks stay home on Election Day and not vote for Trump.
The question is just how clueless are the Dems? Will they convince themselves that shit-life syndrome sufferers give a shit about Trump's impeachment? Will they convince themselves that Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg or Warren are so wonderful that shit-life syndrome sufferers will take them and their campaign promises seriously? Then Trump probably wins again, thanks to both shit-life syndrome and shit-Dems syndrome. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Bruce E. Levine
Bruce E. Levine , a practicing clinical psychologist often at odds with the mainstream of his profession, writes and speaks about how society, culture, politics and psychology intersect. His most recent book is Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person's Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian―Strategies, Tools, and Models (AK Press, September, 2018). His Web site is brucelevine.net
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Dec 29, 2019 | www.truthdig.com
A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the New York Times and Politico published major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins -- but they foreshadow a massive escalation of anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.
Throughout 2019, corporate media routinely asserted that the Sanders campaign had little chance of winning the nomination. As is so often the case, journalists were echoing each other more than paying attention to grassroots realities. But now, polling numbers and other indicators on the ground are finally sparking very different headlines from the media establishment.
From the Times : " Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat ." From Politico : " Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination ."
Those stories, and others likely to follow in copycat news outlets, will heighten the energies of Sanders supporters and draw in many wavering voters. But the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign's chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority.
For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks.
Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage -- synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party -- will range from condescending to savage.
When the Bernie campaign wasn't being ignored by corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain't seen nothing yet.
With so much at stake -- including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party -- no holds will be barred. For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it'll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.
While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that a Sanders presidency is a real possibility . The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets that distort options and encourage passivity.
Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it is done."
From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.
Jan Goslinga 38 minutes ago ,
Maxwell Jan Goslinga 15 minutes ago ,Elections aren't real. Democrats will nominate Joe Biden to lose the election. Trump will remain as fascist strongman and the dems will continue to blame his neoconservative policies on his white trash constituency.
Bernie serves a few important functions.
1. he keeps the radicals from leaving the plantation and going 3rd party.
2. his promotion of progressive policies will make Biden less popular and help him lose to Trump
3. Bernie and his "socialism" can then be blamed for losing the election to TrumpMensch59 Maxwell 8 minutes ago edited ,Unfortunately this comment will be buried in this monstrosity of a thread- now at over 300 comments with only about a third of them having a much relevance.
You might consider re-posting in reply to one of the foremost comments. Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.
I've often wondered how it is people could believe the elections could have any positive and lasting impact on their lives if they have been through a couple of cycles. Do they not also wonder how it is that these election (marketing) campaigns now stretch out for well over a year nowadays demanding everyone's political attention, energy and resources. To say it is a colossal waste does not quite capture the enormity of the mind job being to people.
Mensch59 Jan Goslinga 21 minutes ago ,
Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. You "realists" who are true believers that you have the Truth and have a calling to preach the Truth absolutely must stand against the unwashed masses who claim that your "reality" isn't even intersubjectively verifiable, much less dialectical & material [eta & historical ].
I quite enjoyed what SteelPirate/LaborSolidarity had to say about you attempting to gain a vanguard following by trolling lib-prog sites.
newestbeginning 2 hours ago ,
Elections aren't real.Never pay attention to anyone who claims what's "real" and what isn't. Politics certainly doesn't exist in the realm of an objective, concrete, physical, naturalistic, materialistic reality which is shared by a consensus of rational observers. At best, politics deals with intersubjectively verifiable social phenomena. Thus, politics is mostly idealistic in the belief that each mind generates its own reality.
This realization is the topic of intersubjective verifiability, as recounted, for example, by Max Born (1949, 1965) Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance , who points out that all knowledge, including natural or social science, is also subjective. p. 162: "Thus it dawned upon me that fundamentally everything is subjective, everything without exception. That was a shock."V4V 2 hours ago edited ,Meanwhile the wealth of the world's top 500 grew 25% in 2019...
PGGreen V4V 2 hours ago edited ,Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders's Chances of Success- "...the chances he can be elected are pretty small." (Waiting with bated breath for copious downvotes by those who hate the truth and hate reality).
https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FEpXJvWSa4FQ%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEpXJvWSa4FQ&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FEpXJvWSa4FQ%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube
V4V PGGreen an hour ago ,Most of who support Sanders know that his presidency will involve an uphill battle. Chomsky is being realistic.
But there really is no better option for meaningful change working within the political system than supporting Sanders. it is also important to note that "Our Revolution" has energized many young activists, encouraging them to continue the fight. This goes beyond politics to social and economic issues. If Sanders leaves us with a movement, this may turn out to be more important than the presidency in the long run.
Keep working for effective moral and economic justice and democracy!
PGGreen V4V 21 minutes ago edited ,Well, I have said this several times, it's not the microscopic left that you need to convince, it's the majority of self-identifying Democrats not supporting Sanders that you need to convince. I am repelled by the Democratic Party, but there are millions who identify as Democrats and many are proud of it. You need to convince them, not us.
V4V PGGreen 6 minutes ago ,Yes, although I don't think that those who support a Leftist agenda--whether you actually call them Leftists or not--are quite so microscopic a group as you imply. But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect, or that it will be difficult for him to be elected president. We already know; we simply consider him the best option within this context of voting.
Have you ever thought of turning your approach to systemic commentary (which is valid and interesting, BTW, I'm not discounting it) around and saying what candidates you support-- in this context being discussed of voting-- instead of which ones you don't? And then explaining why such support would be effective?
I would say that what is wrong with the world is more a fault of the economic and political system than of Sanders alone--who not only plays small part in causing what is wrong, but a significant part in trying to correct it. Yes, he works within the system. That is a given. It may be, as Chris Hedges thinks, that there is no hope working within the system. But Noam Chomsky's approach also bears serious consideration that even Hedges doesn't discount. Voting will only be a small part of what brings about change, but it may make some slight difference--if you can stomach it. And it only takes a small amount of time.
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
I don't see much of an argument that Sanders will be no better as president than Trump (and if you think so, I'd like to hear you argue it). I suspect you find the compromise unpalatable. I can understand that. I, too, draw the line at a certain point. I couldn't vote for HRC.
Yes, Sanders isn't perfect. Chomsky also said another important thing: "We're all compromised." Everyone who is a citizen of the US is compromised, and bears some measure of responsibility for the military interventions undertaken by our government. Perhaps we should renounce our citizenship, refuse to pay taxes, etc. But most of us don't -- not even those of us committed to activist work in other ways -- significant ways -- to make things better.
So what are those ways, for you?
Mensch59 PGGreen 16 minutes ago ,But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect
-for me it isn' that he's not perfect, it's that I think he sucks
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
-funny, that's a favorite line of Democrats
I get that, but it doesn't negate that Sanders's chances are next to nil.
Your suggestion of me signaling whom I support would fall on deaf ears around here. I have said this many times- I will probably for the Green Party candidate or the Socialist Equality Party candidate. If only a Democrat and Republican appear on the ballot then I would refuse to vote even if I had to pay a fine. I am not in the habit of telling anyone whom to vote for unless asked.
Before a 3rd can succeed, the fantasy that the fix can come through the Democrats needs to be destroyed. Not to worry, in due time it will be obvious.
Patrick_Walker V4V 2 hours ago edited ,My guess/bet is that V4V believes that the truth "We're all compromised" doesn't apply to him.
He sees himself as a truth-knower and a truth-teller.
He won't commit to logical argumentation.
He'll preach the truth to you.V4V Patrick_Walker an hour ago edited ,I saw this video long ago--and agreed with it. But though Sanders' chances are small, they're still vastly larger than the NONEXISTENT chances of success of the purist, "Born to Lose" left. Why not just admit that you've totally given up and simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
acme V4V an hour ago ,simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
-straw man
That isn't what I do because I couldn't care less whom Democrats support and vote for. Typically, I post some unpleasant truth about Sanders, like his lackluster polling numbers or his support for neoliberal warmongers and sit back and watch the ad hominems and downvotes roll in. I am not normally on the attack, I am usually on the receiving end.
I admit that I see this forum as a form of entertainment. I admit I have zero expectation that someone to my liking will be elected president and that the system is going to change anytime soon. Do I believe it possible? Yes, I believe it is possible, I just don't believe it possible using the corrupt, Democratic Party as a vehicle and that's where we differ.
And that the crux of our issue- you believe the Democratic Party can be used a vehicle to convert the CIA/Wall Street/War Inc. Democrats into the peoples' party, and I do not. If the needed changes are ever to arrive, it will be in spite of the Democrats not because of them. I hope you stick around because in due time I'll be telling you, "Told ya so."
V4V acme an hour ago edited ,The problem with your position is that, unlike Sanders, you don't seem to understand that a third candidate party candidate hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of being president unless if s/he somehow gets more electoral votes that both the major parties combined. If not, it goes to the house, and in the current partisan atmosphere, would be decided for the candidate of the House majority.
The major parties have a death-grip on the presidency while the electoral college exists.Zsuzsi Kruska 4 hours ago edited ,You don't seem to understand that Sanders has a snowball's chance in hell of being the Democratic Party candidate for many reasons including the DNC arguing in court it is a private corporation and can legally rig primary and the trusty superdelegates for Biden.
What I propose is a movement outside the Democratic Party in inside it. I believe any attempt to reform the Democratic Party is doomed to fail. All this whistling in the dark over Sanders is a distraction and a kicking the can down the road to the time you Democrats finally realize it isn't going to work. You obviously didn't learn it in 2016, and I would be surprised if you learn it once Sanders tanks and begins campaigning for Biden just like he did Clinton. I will promise this, I'll say, "I told ya so" in a matter of months. That's okay, play it again, Sam.
People believe they need others to tell them what to do and give them the illusion somebody cares about them and has their best interests at heart. That's an archetype in the brain that goes back to our baby/childhood when we were dependent on our caregivers for sustenance, comfort and life itself.That's where the original concept of needing "leaders" comes from. But, what happens is psyco/sociopaths see this weakness in humanity and force their way to the top, to herd and exploit the gullible sheeple for their own agendas and selfish interests. No matter who rises to the top, she/he got their through the same system that's been going on since tribes had their chief; chief's lieutenant and witch doctor/shaman. Those three keep the tribe in line with their own desires. Chief through brute force, his lieutenant through information and witch doctor through religion and "spiritual" services; and all three require tribute and fees from the rest of the tribe. So, you will see, regardless of who the next POTUS will be, that same structure, although more complex today, will repeat itself. New boss/old boss, same ol' same ol'. All power has to be returned to the people at the local level before Wash. starts WWIII. But, if that happens, at least we won't have to worry about global warming with a nuclear winter after the bombs drop.
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Jan 01, 2020 | www.unz.com
Mulegino1 says: December 19, 2019 at 5:08 pm GMT 300 Words @J Adleman
You and other whites here are like the bad guys in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time. Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends. Our ankles survive.
YOU DO NOT.Talk about deflection. Any nation, empire, culture or civilization wherein the Jewish collective gains critical mass and ultimately absolute power turns into a real horror, not a movie. The Jews may be said to be the true prototype of the "bad guys in every horror movie", since they can only be gotten rid of by very rigorous means taken in the healthiest and most vigorous cultures and societies. Indeed, antisemitism itself is the healthy immunological reaction of a flourishing culture, and its lack thereof the pathology of a moribund one.
Woke Christians of European provenance have nothing to envy the Jew (the archetypal Jew) over. We realize that the true measure of success is not primarily monetary or the fulfillment of cheap ambitions, but a spiritual and cultural one. On the contrary, the Jewish hatred against Christian Europe and the civilization that it constructed is engendered out of sheer envy and malice, because Jewry understands that is would never be capable of constructing anything similar, and never has. In all of the arts, Jewry has produced nothing of note.
This is not to say that individual Jews have not made contributions to the arts and sciences, but they have done so only by participation in gentile culture, not qua Jews. Jewry only tears down and deconstructs; it is not creative in the sense of high art, and can thrive only in the swamp of gentile decadence and moral putrefaction. Whatever Jewry touches, it turns to merde.
Ilya G Poimandres , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:09 pm GMT
@Anon specifically push them away from materialism and desire for money and power, even at the expense of others. That is the exact point of religion (self-improvement) btw, so the next question is is the Jewish religion effective?Rebel0007 , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:11 pm GMTAt which point, the Jewish ideology becomes the wolf in the hen house because it fails to tame the human away from such materialistic desire (as it btw claims it does best).
Should the hens be allowed to point out what they see as a wolf? Yes.
That the supposed wolf then obfuscates and justifies their actions by pointing to others, mostly, betrays that it is, in fact, a wolf.
9/11 Inside job , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:25 pm GMTI have become totally disenchanted with the SEC. Stupid, Evil, Crazy! It would not surprise me if they are the ones that have been terrorizing me, with stupid, evil, crazy chants through appliances after illegallly implaced RFIDs, microchips, or sensors illegally implanted in my ears and nose that started after my first phone was hacked in 2017! Can't expect stupid people not to be stupid, evil people not to be evil, and crazy people not to be crazy! They were just born that way!
@J AdlemanAgent76 , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:33 pm GMTbrookings.edu :
"The US will become minority white in 2045 Census projects " :
"During that year [2045] whites will comprise 49.7 per cent of the population in contrast to 24.6 per cent for Hispanics , 13.1 per cent for Blacks , 7.9 per cent for Asians and 3.8 per cent for multi-racial populations " Are these projections good or bad for the "Jewish people " ?
Robjil , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:39 pm GMTJan 28, 2010 The Creature From Jekyll Island (by G. Edward Griffin)
A Second Look at the Federal Reserve
Nov 22, 2013 Thomas DiLorenzo The Revolution Of 1913
From the Tom Woods show Loyola economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo discusses three events from 1913 that greatly escalated the transmogrification of America from the founder's vision (limited government) to its current state (unlimited government).
@Onebornfree 001. It just as murderous as the first Zion century.More R1b, Less H1B , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:45 pm GMTIf we had a free press that calls out the Jewish Zion Mafia that in itself would solve the problem.
This Zion Mafia is destroying our planet faster than any Climate Change or any pollution.
Yet, we can not speak about it. It is anti-S to speak about what the Big Js do.
Onebornfree, the J mafia roams the world without being bound to any nation. A nation-less world would not stop their menace.
The best way to stop this world wide menace is free speech to talk about it. Usury control is the next step to end this menace to our planet.
@Lot sons of Abraham name their businesses after themselves (I'm sure this will insincerely be attributed to some fear of native kulaks' repressed urge-to-pogrom, even in Finland or Japan.) The other is an observation made by an associate of a famous Austrian landscapist: even merely remarking on their origins causes these guys mental distress.Mefobills , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:51 pm GMTHere in the melting pot, the difference couldn't be any starker. You can make small talk with any flavor of goy based on it: that's a Polish name, isn't it? Yeah, how did you know! Try this one with Levy or Nussbaum down at The Smith Group or The Jones Foundation and watch them plotz.
Digital Samizdat , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:01 pm GMTJews have always weaponized usury. Long before Christianity, Jews operated the East/West mechanism on donkey caravan trade routes. Silver would drain from the West, and Gold would drain from the east, while Jewish caravaneers would take usury on exchange rate differences. This operated for thousands of years.
Haibaru donkey bones have been discovered outside of Sumer. The Aiparu/Haibaru (Hebrew) tribes were formed as merchants operating between city states. In those days, psychopaths and criminals would be excommunicated from civilized city states, and would take up with the wandering merchant tribe.
Why do you think the Jew is always interested in owing the money power? Why do you think the Jew perpetually stands outside the walls of the city state, plotting its destruction?
History tells us things, and we had better listen. That is real history, not what you learned in (((public skool))). There are two ways to deal with the Jew: 1) Remove him from your country. 2) Limit him.
Limiting was done by Byzantium under Justinian. The Jew was limited FROM money counting/banking; limited from participation in government; limited from access to pervert young minds especially as school teachers and professors.
It takes a King or Tsar who cares about his population, and is willing to eject or filter out toxins from the body politic. (((Democracy))) is a failed form of government, whereby monied Oligarchs control the polity by compromat and pulling strings.
You are not going to be able to vote your way out of the Jew problem.
@Colin WrightAgent76 , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:03 pm GMTEchoing words once supposedly used by Hermann Goering: whenever I here the word 'philanthropist' these days, I instinctively reach for my revolver!
Mefobills , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:07 pm GMTJan 23, 2012 Why the Constitution Had to Be Destroyed | Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Archived from the live Mises tv broadcast, this lecture was presented by Tom DiLorenzo at the Mises Circle in Houston on 14 January 2012.
@Ilya G Poimandres edina. Ergo, Wahabbi Islam and the Takfiri's are doctrinaly correct, while Judaizer Christians (those that worship the old testament) are out of alignment and heretics.Robjil , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:18 pm GMTJudaism is actually a new religion that came into being after 73 AD, when the verbal tradition (Caballa) became written down into Talmud.
Our Jewish friends have always been practicing usury, going back to since forever.
Our Jewish friends, I count as worse that Islamics. However two wrongs don't make a right. Islam badly needs reform or to be expunged. Talmudic Judaism is by far the worst religion on the planet, and its adherents must malfunction by definition.
@9/11 Inside jobMefobills , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:20 pm GMTJewish bigwigs think that the world will be their oyster if there are less White Euros in the world.
Yet, Jewish Advisors have been at the top of white Euro nations for centuries as their oyster to pillage the planet.
Non-White Euro people may not be so welcoming to Jewish Advisors at the top telling to them to go to war or pillage their fellow non-White Euros.
I don't think that the big Jews at the top thought this out too much.
@Onebornfree You are missing something because you are unwilling to adapt and learn with new information. This makes you an ideologue.Rebel0007 , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:30 pm GMTLibertarianism IS A JEWISH CONSTRUCT.
There are no such things as free markets. Money's true nature is law, not gold. Money didn't come into being with barter and other nonsense lolbertarians believe.
Most of the luminaries that came up with "libertarian" economics are Jews, and it is a doctrine of deception. The idea is to confuse the goyim with thoughts and ideas that make them easy pickings.
A determined in-group of predators operating in unison, will take down an "individual" every-time.
alex in San Jose AKA digital Detroit , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:34 pm GMTDon't expect anything to improve with Jay Clayton as SEC Chair, and his wife and her father Gretchen Butler Clayton who was CEO of CSC and mysterious WMB Holdings which share the same address in addition to many Goldman Sachs divisions. Gretchen was employed by Goldman Sachs as an attorney from 1999-2017. Many companies affiliated with the Panama Papers share the same address as well.
Secrecy has expanded under Clayton.
Digital Samizdat , says: December 19, 2019 at 6:36 pm GMTJewish people have treated me better than my own White Euro family.
Jews are tribal, gee what a surprise after 1000's of years of people trying to wipe them out . and so their charity is within the tribe, but there is no charity within the tribe among Whites.
Jews, along with Asians and at least some Africans, believe in not just climbing the ladder, but in actually helping others at least family up it also. Whites believe in climbing the ladder and then pulling it up after them.
I was explaining to a friend recently: My (relative) has proven that if I showed up at their door, starving, they'd not give me a cheese sandwich, while in my experience, strangers have been overall a fairly kind lot and a stranger, 50/50, might. Therefore, while I find the idea of robbing or burning down the house of a stranger abhorrent, I don't mind the idea so much when it involves a person who's proven to be cold and evil.
For more on this, see the book Angela's Ashes. The Irish family could have stayed in New York where they were being befriended by a Jewish family. There was a ray of hope. The Irish kids, at least, would have been fed, steered into decent schooling, etc. But foolishly they went back to Ireland, to be treated like utter dogshit by their fellow White family and "people".
Most of the predation going on in the US and worldwide is being done by WASPS who are using Jews as a convenient scapegoat.
@tono bungayDigital Samizdat , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:01 pm GMTFeel free to offer us some counter-examples, tono. How many such funds to you know of that aren't disproportionately Jewish? We're all ears!
renfro , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:16 pm GMTFinally! An intelligent criticism of Trump for a change. So tired of the brainless Democrat/MSM impeachment circus. They make me feel like a reflexive MAGAtard just for defending the constitution, logic, etc., from their never-ending stream of inanities. Meanwhile, the real problem with Trump is not that he's Hitler; it's that he's not Hitler enough!
I am also so tired of Zionist-loving cucks bleeting on about the evils of the CRA without ever considering the role played by the (((profiteers))) who lobbied such policies into law in the first place. Realize that what Paul Singer does for a living used to be illegal in this country up until recently. That's right: US bankruptcy law used to forbid investors from buying up debt second-hand at a discount and then trying to reclaim the entire face value from the debtor. But I see all kinds of people even on this thread blaming the victim instead -- 'Damn goyishe deadbeats!' Whatever
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even any recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by politicians."
Nuff said?
@anon maintain your honor, and manners and still succeed. Jews take the easy low road of deception and cheating. WASP take the higher road of harder work and ethical business practice.the grand wazoo , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:19 pm GMTWALL STREET'S LAST GENTLEMAN, Richard Jenrette
[MORE]Ilya G Poimandres , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:28 pm GMT"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I" care not who makes its laws"
That is what Mayer Amschel Rothchild said in the 1750s. Now, is it a stretch of my imagination to believe the Central Banks of the West, all Jewish controlled, would unfairly favor their 'own' when issuing or disbursing the money they are permitted to create.
We are not allowed to audit the Federal Reserve, so we know not what they do with it beyond what they tell us. In 2016 it was discovered that between the year 1999 and 2016 well over $23 trillions had been stolen from just 2 departments of our government, the DoD and HUD. (Someone should look at NASA). Is it possible the seed money, for not only Venture capitalists schemes but also buying governments and law makers, has been diverted, shoveled out of the back door of these corrupt central banks and into the hands of their fellow jews?
Anyway, the more exposure articles like this get the closer we get to ending their reign.@Mefobills he pressure will only be towards violence for any nation or faith!Colin Wright , says: Website December 19, 2019 at 7:31 pm GMTJudaism has monopolized for millennia though, and still acts as a victim. Different kettle of fish.
Also, you can debate the positives and negatives of Islam with a Muslim (not as a rabid ignoramus of course you must be polite, and have learnt something, as well as be open to learning more). Almost every debate with a Jew about Judaism has started with, continued with, and ended with name calling for me however.
Judaism fails as a religion because it does not encourage the practitioner to look at themselves when confronted with error, Islam still does imo.
anarchyst , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:34 pm GMTSo I scanned through the posts quickly -- probably too quickly.
How many specific, gentile vulture capitalists currently prominent in the field have been named so far?
When you list them, please respond to my post so that I will be notified.
@Colin WrightMark Hunter , says: Website December 19, 2019 at 7:41 pm GMTYour statement: "Jews actually collaborated extensively in the imposition of tyranny on the working class in Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1991" not only applies to Europe, but the united States of America as well.
Digital Samizdat , says: December 19, 2019 at 7:55 pm GMT1. Re Sidney, Nebraska: Maybe I'm missing something but wasn't it Cabela's owners, for example co-founder and chairman Jim Cabela, who sold Cabela, not Elliot Management (Singer et al)? I gather Elliot Management owned only 11% of the company. Was that enough to force them to sell?
2. The article confuses honest straightforward loans with tax farming and government corruption. Loans can be very useful, e.g. for a car to get to a job, or for a house so you build up equity instead of paying rent.
@BannedHipsterAccording to the Talmud, we goyim are not the descendants of Adam and Eve, like the Jews. No, we are the bastard progeny of Adam's first wife, Lilleth, who eloped with the demon Samael. So we goyim are really all half-demons and therefore we are an abomination in the sight of Jew-hova, and we get what we deserve at the hands of his 'chosen people'.
All clear now?
Art , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:03 pm GMT.
@Colin Wright to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.Andrew Carnegie built something that made life better for people. Making steel is a beneficial thing.
These evil vulture Jews build nothing they make people poorer. They suck the wealth out of people who have little. They know 100% what they are doing.
Jesus expressed anger against the money changers on the temple steps.
It is OK for you to have natural human feelings and be angry at these Jew bastards.
Do No Harm
Art , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:08 pm GMT
tomo , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:16 pm GMTMajor Kudos to these three heroes Ron Unz, Tucker Carlson, and Andrew Joyce for this article and discussion.
@anon ith him on this trip. It was an awful experience consistent with all the books I read on psychopaths and also that book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, the weight of 3000 yearsOld and grumpy , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:22 pm GMTAnother very wealthy American mother of a friend asked her South African friends (also jews) to help her book trips in South Africa (and they of course recommended only their Jewish friends) it's their son who told me this.
So a lot of backstabbing, cultural nepotism and actively (but in a hidden way as most psychopaths like to do) they do at wakening and isolating their host. That's their only advantage not intelligence (at least in my experience )@DaveEthe grand wazoo , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:27 pm GMTI don't even know what capitalism means anymore. It doesn't seem like it's an actual free market system. Seems like it is slavery for the little guy, and parasitism for the rich. Maybe we should ditch the word capitalism for usuryism.
@RealistMefobills , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:31 pm GMTNo, not stupid whites, they're not to blame. It's the greedy corrupt politician: white, black, or white jew, who are to blame.
@Ilya G Poimandres o including offensive war. I used the term political authority on purpose, because Islam is more than just a religion, it is a political-theocratic construct that is all-encompassing.annamaria , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:43 pm GMTThere may not be a specific verse allowing aggressive violence, but there is something going on based on the data. (I admit to being a lay-man and not an expert on minutia of Islam. I don't want to go there based on what I already know to be true.)
In Christianity, if there are calls for aggressive violence it is OUT OF ALIGNMENT because of super-session. Christian adherents who do this are Judaizers, and have to use the old testament for justification.
@GhaliAnon [271] Disclaimer , says: December 19, 2019 at 8:59 pm GMT'Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins. "
-- They always find the willing local collaborators ready to make a big profit. Who can forget Dick Cheney, the Enemy of Humanity? The same kind of unrestricted criminality and amorality lives on in Tony Blair the Pious.
The fact that this Catholic weasel and major criminal Tony Blair is still not excommunicated tells all we need to know about the Vatican.
Assange is rotting in a prison, while Tony Blair and Ghislaine Maxwell are roaming free. The Jewish connections pay off.
@J Adelman s as "strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine," the Democratic senators declared, "We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump," before demanding Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigationDaveE , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:00 pm GMTAnd yet Trump pulls the Jews ever closer. A ruling race of ubermenschen now.
'No reason'.
Can you imagine what American Blacks and savage Hispanics let alone whites are going to do if the US economy craters like the Russian economy, and everything is transferred to the banks?
@Old and grumpyMefobills , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:05 pm GMTYeah . fine idea. I've always maintained there are two uses of the word "capitalism" industrial capitalism or competition of ideas vs. financial capitalism, the Darwinian struggle for the most ruthless bankster to rig the "markets" most efficiently.
Whether we give it new terminology I don't care much . but I sure wish people would understand the difference, one way of another !
@alex in San Jose AKA digital Detroit as extended, and had aunts and uncles and cousins, who lived in the general area for centuries, then there would be a network to fall back on.Father O'Hara , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:06 pm GMTSee slaughter of the cities by Jones:
And yes, the FIRE sector and impetus behind the destruction of your extended family was JEWISH. The breakdown of neighborhoods and ethnics was on purpose.
The Jew is anti-logos, and whatever he touches he destroys. (There are exceptions of course but these people no longer possess a negative Jewish spirit.)
Sorry your family was destroyed. When whites become un-moored they don't know how to act.
@J AdlemanAntares , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:06 pm GMTQuite bizarre post. First,he makes a half ass defense of Jew character.(Weinstein, Epstein don't represent jews! Well, they kind of do. Any jew who is called to accounts for his crimes automatically does not represent jews! )
@AnonHappy Tapir , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:12 pm GMTif you think it's wrong to buy or try to collect on defaulted debt, what is the alternative set of laws and behavior you are recommending? If debts can simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function.
Capitalism includes money. You can't separate the risks in lending from other risks. Bad investors should be punished and good investors rewarded. Resources should be well allocated. Otherwise it's not capitalism.
@Rebel0007Anon [271] Disclaimer , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:12 pm GMTI looked at his book on amazon. Do you believe all that stuff? Are these people with psychoses or delusional disorders?
Adrian , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:20 pm GMThttps://www.trunews.com/stream/jew-coup-seditious-jews-orchestrating-trump-impeachment-lynching
These insane Boomers seem to think that there is a Jewish coup underway to remove Trump because of all the things that Jews are saying in Jewish publications and every single person involved being Jewish and stuff.
@Germanicus About the Carnegie donated "Peace Palace" in The Hague, presently the seat of the In ternational Court of Justice:Informed Reader , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:21 pm GMTGermanicus claims:
They are a function of Empire in Hague, who protect empire criminals, and assume a non existent legitimacy and jurisdiction as a private entity to take down empire opponents.
Such as this ruling for instance:
Guardian 3 Oct.2018:
International court of justice orders US to lift new Iran sanctions
Mike Pompeo indicates US will ignore ruling, after judges in The Hague find unanimously in favor of Iran
@Colin Wrightannamaria , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:24 pm GMTColin Wright: Tel Aviv University's Medical School is called the "Sackler Faculty of Medicine." Does that help answer your question?
@silviosilverutu , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:25 pm GMT"What Joyce regards as a defect of "vulture" funds, others might regard as an benefit. "
-- Of course. I hope you did not miss the fact that the Jewish vulture funds -- ruthless, unethical, and leaching on goyim -- contribute to the Jewish Holocaust Museum.
Is not it touching that the same bloody destroyers of nations demand from the same nations a very special reverence -- out of ethical considerations, of course -- towards the Jewish victims of WWII? But only Jewish victims.
All others were not victims but casualties. See Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine. See the unlimited hatred of ziocons towards Russia.
@AnonymousAnon [271] Disclaimer , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:33 pm GMT" but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much needed electric shock if they were to see the JQ framed in marxist terms " I would not count on the effect of the electric shock on the leftist thinkers. The role of Jewish Bolsheviks in the Cheka, NKVD, GULAGs, genocides by famine has been known from the very beginning and yet it left no impact on the leftist thinkers.
renfro , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:50 pm GMTBrowder's case is really interesting. http://www.ihr.org /jhr/v17/v17n6p13_Michaels.html
"According to Harvard University scholar Graham Allison, who is also a former US assistant Secretary of Defense, ordinary Russians have experienced, on average, a 75 percent plunge in living standards since 1991 -- almost twice the decline in Americans' income during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in the midst of this widespread economic misery, a small minority has grown fabulously wealthy since the end of the Soviet era."
"Although Jews make up no more than three or four percent of Russia's population, they wield enormous economic and political power in that vast and troubled country. "At least half of the powerful 'oligarchs' who control a significant percentage of the economy are Jewish," the Los Angeles Times has cautiously noted. (See also: D. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New Russia," May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27.)"
It's interesting how the appeal of Eduard Topol to Jews in Russia is now starting to echo Jewish calls in the United States for Jews to stop the path they are currently on.
Here is the complete text of Topol's extraordinary "Open Letter to Berezovksy, Gusinsky, Smolensky, Khodorkovsky and other Oligarchs," translated for the Journal by Daniel Michaels from the text published in the respected Moscow paper Argumenty i Fakty ("Arguments and Facts"), No. 38, September 1998:
Magnitsky and Bill Browder is also really interesting.
It turns out that a large measure of the Russiagate story arose because Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who traveled to America to challenge Browder's account, arranged a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign advisers in June 2016 to present this other side of the story.
Apparently that's collusion.
But this isn't collusion.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/left-red-scare-democrats-suddenly-hate-russia/
Remember when Obama literally said he would sell out US defence interests to the Russians on a hot mic?
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/corrupt_senators_took_ukraine_cash.html
Then we had Democrats actually literally word for word doing what they accuse Trump of doing in Ukraine.
"It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine's prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as "strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine," the Democratic senators declared, "We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump," before demanding Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation."
What's the first rule of Communist and Satanist Saul Alinsky? Always accuse your opponents of what you are doing.
Imagine having a Grandfather as the literal Chairman of the American Communist Party, and all the amazing lessons you would learn about political maneuvering and ideology.
And it's amazing.
Browder's story is that Russian officials stole his companies seals and then fraudulently formulated a tax avoidance scheme with a complete paper trail that they fabricated against him in totem. Precisely matching the amount of money he was trying to remove from their country, like those other Jewish Oligarchs who imposed conditions that were multiples worse then even the American depression.
When under oath it turns out that Magnitsky wasn't even a lawyer at all, and didn't go to law school. Why did the media owned by Mormons of course keep saying that Magnitsky was Browder's lawyer?
Why did the Russians fraudulently fabricate a paper-trail for another Jewish Oligarch to steal money out of Russia? Just like they colluded with Trump when a Russian lawyer sought to explain what happened. Because that totally happened.
Maybe the problem isn't Capitalism. Maybe, when even the ur-Shabbos goys at National Review are shaking their head and washing their hands like Pilate, maybe it's a different problem.
Yet Trump holds these people ever close to his beating heart.
And then there are all these connections to Jeffrey Epstein that are like an explosion linking all these people.
Poor old Russia. Even Putin isn't worse then what came before.
@Anonymoussteinbergfeldwitzcohen , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:54 pm GMTt class is not tied to any territory has been observable since 1960.
I don't have time now to look up how many of 199 directors are Jews . but I know enough of the economic history of various countries to know that Jews were the first business and finance globe trotters,,,,.from Spain to Amsterdam, France to Africa , etc.etc. Jew were first hired as reps and facilitators by the gentile business owners especially because of their breather tribal contacts in many countries ..that was their stepping stone to becoming transnational capitalist themselves.
Understanding our global capitalist ruling elite and who they are is not rocket science
JUSA , says: December 19, 2019 at 9:59 pm GMTYet more evidence is piling up that Donald J Trump is the Great Betrayer. A man who had the biggest mandate in post war history to clean up the Swamp that is D.C., reform Immigration to save America and reform the economy for American workers. He has squandered all of it while pandering to Jews.
When the Donald is revealed as the Great Betrayer where will Jews run? Yes, they have several back up plans. Patagonia, Ukraine and Israel.
Imagine that. They have their own country and 2 back up plans. It is really tough being a hated, oppressed minority.
@Lotbike-anarkist , says: December 19, 2019 at 10:16 pm GMTbeing much more cautious in their borrowing since the borrowing cost is so high.
Instead, this current arrangement basically uses bond funds to put up a false front, telling a debtor they can borrow at 2% when the real rate should be at 20% given the known risks, then the debtor goes crazy borrowing because it's so cheap to borrow, and when they can't pay back, the bond gets sold to the vultures who come collecting at 20% or they seize assets.
This is no different than the subprime mortgage crap, except now that is regulated so they go after sovereign debt and corporate debt instead. These vultures need to go die period.
@Jimmy1969Anon [112] Disclaimer , says: December 19, 2019 at 10:27 pm GMTThis is a great, concise overview of Canadian media influence by the "silent" Jewish overlords via Golden Tree.
I tried copy/paste of your comment on CBC, but it did NOT last 2minutes before being suspended!!
I am sorry to have used your comment without your permission, but I am going to "misspell" some words to defeat the algorithm to get your message across.
@Lot e, and these golfy-sounding names (Elliot, Monarch, GoldTree, OakTree, Canyon, Tilden Park) fit the perception. We whites receive the society's hate for the wealth disparities created by high finance.steinbergfeldwitzcohen , says: December 19, 2019 at 10:27 pm GMT4. No, it is not difficult to do finance differently. Every other investor has higher patience for poor countries in Central America and Africa, and they all look at Elliot with confused scorn.
And, things would probably run fine without hyper-aggressive multi-billionaires in pushing the courts to f- over those who default on debts they owe to the maximum degree. Japan and Norway do quite fine with businesses that are run by gentle and humble goys who feel ashamed at the thought of getting "too rich."
@J AdlemanAnon [112] Disclaimer , says: December 19, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMTYou will be thrown out.
You will have to choose between Israel, Ukraine and Patagonia. No one else will take you.
You have destroyed our politics, media and economy.
You are not respected.
You buy compliance with money.
You have bankrupted the U.S. dollar with debt pursuing Israel's enemies.You should pack.
Real Soon.
Good Riddance.@Just passing throughthotmonger , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:02 pm GMTI accept the guilt for what whites have done in the past.
But whites have become incredibly generous and gentle with the Other. We have turned in the opposite direction, we are not the same.
Great Britain gave up many of its colonies with no fight. Kenya was given up before there was even an anti-colonial movement in Kenya!
We whites are fair-players, and we respect the right of other peoples to self-determination. We haven't in the past, but we have learned.
Mefobills , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:08 pm GMTBen Franklin and the American revolution was almost put in a similar pinch by the Amsterdam banker Jean DeNeufville. In a letter to John Adams, 14 December 1781*, Franklin explained that DeNeufville wanted as security for a loan "all the lands, cities, territories, and possessions of the said Thirteen States, which they may have or possess at present, and which they may have or possess in the future, with all their income, revenue, and produce, until the entire payment of this loan and the interests due thereon."
Franklin considered that "extravagant" but Newhouse rejoined, "this was usual in all loans and that the money could not otherwise be obtained". Franklin retold in this lengthy letter, "Besides this, I was led to understand that it would be very agreeable to these gentlemen if, in acknowledgment of their zeal for our cause and great services in procuring this loan, they would be made by some law of Congress the general consignee of America, to receive and sell upon commission, by themselves and correspondents in the different ports and nations, all the produce of America that should be sent by our merchants to Europe."
Talk about shooting the moon
While Wikipedia says DeNeufville was Mennonite, Franklin concluded with this colorful -- and bitter -- remark , "By this time, I fancy, your Excellency is satisfied that I was wrong in supposing John de Neufville as much a Jew as any in Jerusalem, since Jacob was not content with any per cents, but took the whole of his brother Esau's birthright, and his posterity did the same by the Canaanites, and cut their throats into the bargain; which, in my conscience, I do not think Mr. John de Neufville has the least inclination to do by us while he can get any thing by our being alive. I am, with the greatest esteem, etc., ✪ B. Franklin."
Perhaps it was just an expression based on an earlier stereotype?
*Bigelow, 1904. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 9 Letters and Misc. Writings
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen o to Uganda and Ugandans were willing, but NO Zion had to have Palestine, and they got it through war, deception, and murder. It was funded by usury, as stolen purchasing power from the Goyim.Anonymous [147] Disclaimer , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:08 pm GMTThe fake country of Israel, is not the biblical Israel, and it came into being by maneuverings of satanic men determined to get their way no matter what, and is supported by continuous deception. Even today's Hebrew is resurrected from a dead language, and is fake. Many fake Jews (who have no blood lineage to Abraham), a fake country, and fake language. These fakers, usurers, and thieves do indeed have their eyes set on Patagonia, what they call the practical country.
@Digital Samizdat feel this makes me weird.Johan , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:15 pm GMTI've been to TOO. However I can't bring myself to start commenting on a white nationalist website. I will admit I am unable to articulate this discomfort presently.
As to your point about Marx I actually forgot about his work on the JQ. The Saker, who is a columnist on this site, referenced Marx's essay on the JQ some time ago. I must have not read the whole thing or I'd have remembered it. I didn't know that Marxism originated with anti-Semitism, but that is fascinating. I have encountered some Marxists in my time and they focus exclusively (predictably) on the cis-white-male patriarchy, or whatever occupies their brainwashed minds after an Introduction to Gender Studies class.
@Anon repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function."secondElijah , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:18 pm GMTIs this children's capitalist theory class time? throwing around some simple slogans for a susceptible congregation of future believers?
Should be quite obvious that people, groups of people, if not whole nations , can be forced and or seduced into depths by means of certain practices. There are a thousand ways of such trickery and thievery, these are not in the theory books though. In these books things all match and work out wonderfully rationally
Then capitalism cannot function? Unfortunately it has become already dysfunctional, if not a big rotten cancer.
@J Adleman Ezekiel 21:25 25 'Now to you, O profane, wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose iniquity shall endtomo , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:28 pm GMT
Jeremiah 5:9 Shall I not punish them for these things?" says the LORD. "And shall I not avenge Myself on such a nation as this?As Jesus said which of the prophets have you not killed or persecuted? The truth hurts. As for me I do not hate Jews ..I feel terribly sad for a people that are capable of greatness and squandered the gifts given to them by God. Are you a holy nation? Don't make me laugh. Repent. Your time is coming. No more running and hiding. Deception will no longer save you only acceptance of the Messiah.
@Father O'HaraClutch these pearls, sqrt, sqrt, sqrt , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:36 pm GMThe can't be bargained with,he can't reasoned with,he doesn't feel pity,remorse,or fear " In other words a 'culture' as a PSYCHOPATH it's a well-oiled psychopath support group
tomo , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:41 pm GMTHey! Don't mention anything a Jew ever did, especially usury, or else the entire cult will go up in a holocaustal mushroom cloud of emo nasal whining. In Judaism you've got a fanatical sect that systematically selects and brainwashes its members to inculcate extreme values of two Big Five personality axes: high neuroticism and low intellect (where intellect means open-mindedness.) Note the existential crisis triggered by a straightforward lecture from The Society for the Study of Unbelievably Obvious Shit.
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/295595/pride-and-prejudice-at-fieldston
Of course Israel is holocausting the Palestinians. This is what happens when the founding myth of a nation is, We wiped em all out and then they wiped us almost all out so now we gotta wipe em all out etc., etc., etc.
Fuck Israel. Fuck the Jewish State.
@J.W. en a narcissist and a psychopath is that the former need people to like them whereas psychopaths genuinely could not care less (although they learn early that acting as if they do can be very helpful , as can always trying to elicit sympathy etc).
As I noticed while reading a few books on psychopathy (I was inspired to after reading Steve Job's biography) their whole 'culture' is structured as a (collective ) PSYCHOPATH.
It seems that (collectively) they cannot care about others even if they wanted to. Due to their sicknessI am not saying they are all that way but overall their 'culture' seems to be that way
Skeptikal , says: December 19, 2019 at 11:56 pm GMT
@Colin Wrighttomo , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:04 am GMTThe Sacklers occupy a hoity-toity rung in the philanthropy universe, as they have given enough $$$ to Harvard for H to paste their name on its museum housing I believe its whole Asian art collection.
Students have now protested Harvard's high-profile gift of probity and cultural status to the Sacklers via, literally, an "Aushangerschild" on a major university museum. Harvard protests back: Jeez, if we don't take the Sacklers' dough we might be obliged to stop taking the dough from Exxon, etc.
@Anon ou are right that loans should be repaid it is immoral to allow a well connected mafia to change all the laws and remove protections while pushing up prices of everything because it suits the lender (who has a licence to print).lavoisier , says: Website December 20, 2019 at 12:22 am GMT
They basically lend money that does not exist and get interest for that. So the more sheeple are tricked into borrowing the better for them, but the worse for everyone else
They should not be allowed to bribe politicians to remove all the protection that was there since 1920s I think.
It's a marriage from hell: easy to bribe Anglosheep meets the masters of predatory bribing who own the printing press@anonPCA , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:24 am GMTThat stupid cuck Trump just got impeached by the House. Thats a good lesson to everybody how much good Jew-ass kissing does for you .you get stabbed in the back anyway lol
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving and treacherous scumbag!
But he should have been impeached for his treachery to the constitution and to the American people for his slavish devotion to all things Jewish!
@mark greenBannedHipster , says: Website December 20, 2019 at 12:26 am GMTThe singular is PHENOMENON for God's sake. Phenomena is plural.
Have Americans always been this illiterate?
@Digital SamizdatDaniel Rich , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:31 am GMTTrue, but irrelevant. The Jews that matter don't read the Talmud or believe in "Adam and Eve."
It's 2020. The Jewish religion is "The Holocaust" and we're all "Nazis."
Frankly, it's these traditional religious notions of "anti-semitism" that get in the way of understanding what is, at the core, an ethnic issue. It's Sheldon Adelson, the Zionist entity in Palestine, and the ADL that are the problem, not some looney-tunes rabbi living in Brooklyn.
@Digital SamizdatRafael Martorell , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:47 am GMTBut I see all kinds of people even on this thread blaming the victim instead -- 'Damn goyishe deadbeats!' Whatever
The number of families who're unable to pay an $500 emergency bill is staggering as is the number of families being 1 paycheck away from bankruptcy.
Yes, some people are totally irresponsible and burn through their money faster than it can be printed, but not all 55,000,000 of 'em.
Milesglorious , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:50 am GMTThe other side of the explanation is the lacking of reaction of the victim, the american people. The least that the people that loot the world trough and with the USA power should do, is ,at least ,let us,the american people, a free ride.
@anarchystFrank Frivilous , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:51 am GMTAnd when it comes, vae victis.
Rafael Martorell , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:59 am GMTWell, DynCorp has a particularly insidious reputation beyond your run of the mill Usury.
Not illegal in the Talmud either but most certainly illegal in all of the countries that DynCorp was caught profiting from this type of business. For some reason they never seem to suffer for their exposure suggesting that they may be wielding the same influence that Epstein had over our elected officials.
Thomasina , says: December 20, 2019 at 1:14 am GMTWe dont have to get back to the Singer of this world but to our own politicians ,that allowed them to do this to us,and to the world.In this kind of abusive realtionship the 2 sides are to blame.
@Just passing through h and then moved over to the West with their newfound gains, buying up properties, forcing prices up for the natives. The western corporations not only wanted cheap products to export back to the U.S., but they were also developing a whole new market Chinese consumers who would buy their products as well. Double plus good!Isthatright , says: December 20, 2019 at 1:23 am GMTAnd once in the West, the Chinese and the Indians stick to their groups. They hire their own, promote their own, do business together. A lot of corruption, money laundering, cheating, taking advantage of and bending laws. Rule of law? Code of ethics? Morals? Do unto others? They never learned it. Opportunistic dual citizens.
@Colin WrightFayez chergui , says: December 20, 2019 at 1:31 am GMTTucker is smart. He never uses the J word. Great article.
lavoisier , says: Website December 20, 2019 at 1:42 am GMTThe only path to understand the spirit of jews to money is to read the Old Testament : clear and sharp.
@utuRebel0007 , says: December 20, 2019 at 1:42 am GMTI would not count on the effect of the electric shock on the leftist thinkers. The role of Jewish Bolsheviks in the Cheka, NKVD, GULAGs, genocides by famine has been known from the very beginning and yet it left no impact on the leftist thinkers.
It unfortunately has not had much of an effect on a lot of people in the West, who remain ignorant or in denial of the role played by Jewish Bolsheviks in historic mass murders and totalitarian repression.
Waiting for the Hollywood movie to tell the story.
Mefobills , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:02 am GMT[Too much totally off-topic crackpottery. Stop this or most of your future comments may get trashed.]
@utu9/11 Inside job , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:10 am GMTThis is why you need to start with Zarlinga, as there is no BS to lead you astray. Hudson tends to drill the bulls-eye too. There is so much deception in the field of money and economy, that it is easy to get caught up in false narratives, like one-born free libertarianism. Usury flows fund the deception, even to the point of leaving out critical passages in translations, such as in Aristotle's works. Or, important works are bought up and burned.
Michael Hudson is the leading economist resurrecting Classical Economics. Reading all of Hudson and Zarlinga will take some time and effort, but it is good to take a first step.
@Anon According to Wikipedia : " The armed rebellion of the Mau Mau was the culminating response to Colonial rule . Although there had been previous instances of violent resistance to colonialism , the Mau Mau revolt was the most prolonged and violent anti-colonial warfare in the British Colonial colony. From the start the land was the primary British interest in Kenya ."Realist , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:17 am GMT
Just as the Kenyans suffered the consequences of British colonialism , the "Palestinians will suffer
the consequences of Zionist colonialism until Israel's original sin is boldly confronted and justly remedied " foreignpolicyjournal.com@the grand wazooCitizen of a Silly Country , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:20 am GMTNo, not stupid whites, they're not to blame. It's the greedy corrupt politician: white, black, or white jew, who are to blame.
Who votes these greedy corrupt politicians into office? Hint: It is Whites who are the majority.
@anonThomasina , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:22 am GMTdistinction of Jewish investors versus gentile investors on average, of course is their use of bribery to get the force of government behind them. Rather than taking a bet about some group being able to pay back some bonds and letting the chips fall where they may, Jews start bribing or influencing politicians to force that group to pay back the bonds.
Buy some bonds, charge outrageous fees, bribe officials in some form or other, get govt to force the payment of bonds and outrageous fees. Rinse and repeat. Jews have been doing this in some form aor another for 1500 years. It's why the peasants get a tad angry at both the Jews and their bribed politicians/nobility.
@lavoisierRobert Dolan , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:37 am GMTmoney. Dear me, wait until that comes out.
Trump is in league with the Jews? Yeah, who isn't? Obama's lips are still sore from kissing Jewish Wall Street bankers' asses (notice that none of them went to jail). Same with the Clinton's.
You can get politicians to pass all sorts of laws in your favor if you've got enough dirt on them. After all, your side owns the media, Hollywood, academia, the courts, the banks.
If dirt doesn't work, you can always threaten to impeach them in order to get what you want.
But Trump is also revealing every last dirty one of them (accidentally or on purpose). People see them now.
Colin Wright , says: Website December 20, 2019 at 2:49 am GMT...Trump sucks. All decent people should stand up and fight against these scumbags.
They can't play whack a mole with all of us.
@Informed Readertomo , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:50 am GMT'Colin Wright: Tel Aviv University's Medical School is called the "Sackler Faculty of Medicine." Does that help answer your question?'
That sort of thing is what led me to ask the question.
@Father O'HaraAlso Jewish , says: December 20, 2019 at 2:52 am GMTI now use therm 'Weinsteined' to mean 'raped' (by jewish banksters, investors etc)
@J Adelmantomo , says: December 20, 2019 at 3:00 am GMTJ Adelman comes out swinging. He's such a tough guy. But does he make sense? Does he care if he makes sense? The writer is talking about those Jews who are vulture capitalists. He's not talking about every Jew. Isn't it a little odd that nearly all of these funds are run by Jews? Can your corrupt mind accept that fact and address the question? Or are you going to bore us with your religion and by that I mean your obsession with anti-semitism, which is your religion.
@bike-anarkistColin Wright , says: Website December 20, 2019 at 3:04 am GMTI posted the same comment on the Facebook a few hours ago and it's still there
@Artmark green , says: December 20, 2019 at 3:23 am GMT'Hmm -- The day after Trump in inaugurated for his second term -- will Iran be in his crosshairs? We need to think very seriously about that!
My guess is Iran is in the crosshairs. Trump probably promised he'd start the war as soon as he was elected the first time -- but he putzed around, and now it's almost 2020. Adelson et al are pissed -- but Trump's got a point. If he starts the war now the unknown Democrat will win -- and do you trust their word instead? They just gotta trust Trump. Let him get reelected -- then he'll come through.
This is one of those cases where I'll be happy to be proved wrong -- but such is my suspicion.
@PCAredmudhooch , says: December 20, 2019 at 4:13 am GMTStop splitting hairs. Is this the best you can do? Are you one of Lot's cronies? I don't normally address petty matters of this kind but Joyce is describing a multitude of sins and misconduct orchestrated by various Jewish financiers around the globe. It is not merely one phenomenon; thus, 'phenomena' fits. Go troll someone else.
Thomasina , says: December 20, 2019 at 5:31 am GMTTypical Jew baiting article. Mitt Romney isn't a "Jew" Ashish Masih isn't. Many more examples of gentiles taking advantage of their brothers. May as well consider the Walton family of Wal-Mart to be vultures as well since they benefit the most from this system, they're so called Christians, not Jews.
The problem is capitalism. Author seems to suggest that a moral economic system has been corrupted. The system was designed in an era of widespread slavery folks. Its an immoral system that requires theft, slavery, war, immigration, all the things you hate, to survive. The system is working exactly as it is designed to work. Exploit workers, the environment and resources, shift all the profits from workers to the owners of capital, period. Welcome to the late stage, it eats and destroys itself
From the days of the colonists slaughtering the Injuns and stealing their land. The days of importing African slaves, and indentured servants. The days of child labor and factory owners hiring Pinkertons to gun down workers who protested shitty wages and working conditions. The good ol days of the gilded age. Now the age of offshoring to China or some other lower wage nation. Overthrowing leaders not willing to let their resources and people be plundered and enslaved, driving refugees to our borders fleeing violence and poverty. Importing H1B workers to drive down wages. It was always a corrupt system of exploitation/theft/slavery. This is nothing new and doesn't require "Jews" to be immoral.
And all these so called "Christians" like Pastor Pence approve. Usury and capitalism run amok. I'm sure Jesus is smiling down on all these Bible toting demons who allow their fellow man to be exploited by the parasites. Sad!
Good for Tucker. He has his moments I'd watch his show if he wasn't a partisan hack. But that will never happen working for Fox or any other corporate media.
@AnonThomasina , says: December 20, 2019 at 6:18 am GMTYou've read "Red Notice", but that is only Browder's side. To get the other side, read these articles from Consortium News:
@Colin Wright , maybe you're just assassinated.ivan , says: December 20, 2019 at 9:38 am GMTTrump loves his daughter and she is married to a Jew. If they're not getting their way, I could see them telling Trump: "Sad what happened at the Pittsburgh synagogue, isn't it? Sure hope nothing like that happens to your daughter."
I don't envy Trump. He not only is up against the Democrats, but he is also fighting the globalist neocons in his own party. Both parties want open borders and more war, something Trump does not believe in. As far as I can see, he's throwing them bones in order to shut them up. If he gets elected again, which I think he will, we might see a different Trump. Who knows.
PaddyWhack , says: December 20, 2019 at 9:58 am GMTRather amusing to read our resident Jewish apologists carrying on about the absolute sanctity of the necessity of collecting debts to the functioning of the capitalistic system. These nations and corporate entities that are now in thrall of the Wall Street Jews , were herded into debt by that other faction of the capitalist system, the dealers in easy money. Snookering the rubes into lifelong debt, telling them that money is on the tap, promoting unsustainable spending habits and then let the guillotine come down, for the vultures to feed on. They are two sides of the same coin.
Its damned funny that the rich Jews nowadays are absolutely addicted to usury, rentier activities, and debt collection, when the Bible itself condemns such activities. But they are our elder brothers in faith according to some.
@Colin WrightCalvin Simms , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:12 am GMTCarnegie was a Protestant. The Protestant cancer serves it's Jewish masters. Read 'The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit' by E. Michael Jones. There is definitely a revolutionary nature to the international Jew just as there is to their Protestant dupes. Jewish nature is to subvert the natural order and the west was built by the guidance of LOGOS. The Catholic Faith created by God guided the creation of the west. These Jewish exploits are a result of the Wests rejection of its nature and its enslavement
anno nimus , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:38 am GMTAmazing article from the ever insightful Andrew Joyce. The usual apologists are sputtering to try to mitigate the damage, but the game is almost up.
Wizard of Oz , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:38 am GMT1. rich or poor, creditor or debtor, in the final analysis, ultimately, all will become equal in the grave. the filthy rich might decide to lay their corpses in coffins made of gold, but it will be in vain. the sorrows and the joys of this fleeting world shall quickly pass like the shadow.
2. talmudics feel the need to accumulate money in order to have sense of security since they were stateless for two millennia. paradoxically, amount of wealth is indirectly proportional to a sense of security, provoking backlash from aggrieved host people.
3. establishment of State of Israel did not reduce the need for the accumulation but has only heightened it since now talmudics feel the need to support it so that she could maintain military superiority over neighbouring threats.
4. as long as Palestinians are not free and Israel does not make peace, talmudics will continue to meddle in American politics. if you don't want to save the Palestinians for the sake of humanity and truth or justice, at least you should do it for your own sake.
5. loan sharking, vulture whatever, etc., is the ugliness of big capitalism with capital C, what is beyond sickening is the promotion of sodomy. if one becomes poor or homeless, it's a pity. to go against nature is an abomination.
6. by using such words as "homosexual" you have accepted the paradigm of the social engineers and corruptors, and are therefore collaborating with them. words have consequences since that is how we convey ideas unless you own Hollywood and can produce your own moving pictures too.
7. talmudics is a better word than as a great American scholar says, since people who promote sodomy are absolutely opposed to the Torah (O.T.). those who still struggle to follow it couldn't care less what happens to benighted goyim, only becoming reinforced in pride of their own purity as opposed to disgraced nations. thus, practically, they too are talmudics, alien to the spirit of the ancient holy fathers and prophets of Israel. the word "Orthodox" has been stolen and now has lost all meaning or it means the exact opposite of what it originally meant.
8. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5@Colin Wright9/11 Inside job , says: December 20, 2019 at 11:30 am GMTWell there's nothing wrong in principle about specialists in valuing distressed debt and managing it nuying such debt and using the previously established mechanisms for getting value out of their investment. So the problem is how they go about enforcing their rights and the lack of regulation to mitigate hardship in hard cases.
Still it is notable that it should, overwhelmingly be a Jewish business and such a powerful medium for enriching Jewish causes and communities at the expense of poor Americans.
@Colin WrightRealist , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:07 pm GMTGeorge Bush needed Tony Blair's support to attack Iraq , Donald Trump now has the support of Boris Johnson to attack Iran : "Boris Johnson refuses to rule out military intervention on Iran ." metro.co.uk
It is said that the "deep state " removed Theresa May from office as she was "too soft" on Iran . As you suggest the attack will not happen until Trump's second term unless, in the meantime , there is a false flag attack like 9/11 which can be blamed on the Iranians .
@eahDigital Samizdat , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:09 pm GMTWhile Whites theoretically still have the numbers to affect/determine the outcome of elections, a majority of Whites usually stay home because they are tired of the 'evil of two lessers' choice they are offered -- even voting for Trump got them little/nothing.
I said nothing of an electoral solution to America's problems the problems will not be solved that way.
@ArtDigital Samizdat , says: December 20, 2019 at 12:18 pm GMTThat scary thought has crossed my mind, too, Art. I've even started wondering if this whole impeachment circus is really part of an elaborate plot to guarantee Trump's re-election. I mean, would Pelosi's insane actions make the slightest sense otherwise? And everyone has noted how this is such a 'Jew coup,' haven't they? It all looks so suspicious
@MefobillsThomasina , says: December 20, 2019 at 4:14 pm GMTWhat our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections, killing dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to see with their own eyes.
Yup. And don't forget that ongoing Zionist psy-op known as the AMIA bombing: https://thesaker.is/hezbollah-didnt-do-argentine-bombing-updated/
@geokat62Ilya G Poimandres , says: December 20, 2019 at 4:14 pm GMT"'I'm HARDCORE Zionist and so is president Trump!' Roger Stone"
If Trump was hardcore Zionist, they wouldn't have been going after him since the day he announced he would run for President.
No, they see him as an absolute threat to their existence.
As they twist to fight him, they are all exposing themselves.
@Mefobills mo.. maybe other than when 100% of the Ummah agree on something, I read that could remove a surah of the Quran, like a voice of God. That rhymes nicely imo.Desert Fox , says: December 20, 2019 at 4:48 pm GMTOf course how to judge which ruling to use? I agree, it brings in a casuistry into the faith that generally helps to confuse.. I don't know much about it though yet.
I think Islam preaches a decent message, but the average practitioner is open to misinterpret it quite a bit. This is a failing of the teaching.. but I think Mohammed's message was corrupted like Christ's message pretty much straight after his death. Gospel of Thomas and Tolstoy's rewrites all the way for something closer imo.
@ThomasinaMefobills , says: December 20, 2019 at 4:51 pm GMTTrump is a hardcore zionist and the impeachment is another zionist scam to divide the American people, read The Protocols of Zion.
@sally n in iniquity, and that is where your eye should gaze, not necessarily at the FED or any central bank.Trinity , says: December 20, 2019 at 5:05 pm GMTThe debt money system and finance capitalism is state sponsored usury, and is a Jewish construct.
Vulture capitalism is simply vultures buying up or creating distressed assets and then changing the law, or using force to then collect face value of the debt instrument or other so called asset. Vultures will use hook or crook to force down what they are buying, and hook or crook to force up what they are selling. God's special people can do this because when they look in the mirror, they are god, and are sanctioned to do so.
Mefobills , says: December 20, 2019 at 5:09 pm GMTMaybe the vulture should replace the bald eagle as America's favorite bird since our dear shabbos goy President Trump and cohorts are undermining the First Amendment and trying to make it a crime to criticize Jews and/or Israel. Oh and don't think I am promoting the other Zionist and their shabbos goy on the demshevik side. The Jew CONTROLS both sides and "our" two party system has become Jew vs. Jew, not republican vs. democrat. Lenin said that the best way to control the opposition was to lead it and (((they))) are at it AGAIN.
@Ilya G Poimandres zies, who twist scripture. Judaism, especially Talmudic Judaism is Kabala and utterances of the sages, and it morphs and changes over time. For example, after Sabatai Sevi, the Kol-Neidre was weaponized, and this construct is used by today's Zionists to wreak havoc. Before Sabatai, there was Hillel, who weaponized usury.Digital Samizdat , says: December 20, 2019 at 5:31 pm GMTYes, I agree about Christianity changing quite a bit. In the first 300 years it was much different than today, especially after the Arien controversy was settled by Constantine's maneuvering of Bishops at council of Nicea. For example, before; reincarnation was part of Christian doctrine, and after; reincarnation was excluded.
@utu Great clip! I always loved Fry & Laurie.likbez , says: December 20, 2019 at 5:50 pm GMTI have long maintained that libertarianism/capitalism is really like a kind of Calvinism for atheists. Calvinists used to assume that, since whatever happened was God's will and God's will was invariable good, then whatever happened was good. Likewise, many modern cucks seem to have just substituted The Market for God. Morally speaking, it all lets man off the hook for anything that resultsespecially when those men happen to be Jewish financiers!
No, boys and girls, The Market is not inherently good. It requires that a moral system be superimposed on top of it in order to make it moral.
@Anon k of this MI6 asset (and potential killer) who tried to fleece Russia, you probably can benefit from watching a movie by Nekrasov about him. See references in:Anonymouse , says: December 20, 2019 at 5:59 pm GMTIt looks like it was Browder who killed Magnitsky, so that he can't spill the beans. And then in an act of ultimate chutzpah played the victim and promoted Magnitsky act.
@Colin WrightBrundlefly , says: December 20, 2019 at 6:04 pm GMTThere is no defending these jewish malefactors. It has been pointed out that immorality is a disposition to be found in every ethnicity. The problem is that the jews with that disposition are more clever than folks from other ethnicities with the same dispostion. Being more clever, they are outstandinly better at depradation. I don't see how and why the recognition of the existence of evil jews justifies the author's hatred of jews as a whole.
@Colin Wrightannamaria , says: December 20, 2019 at 6:27 pm GMTColin, I'm going to assume this is a rhetorical question, as there is not one example that would cause you to suspect there is really any doubt about the types of organizations that the Sacklers are donating their ill-gotten wealth to.
@Digital Samizdat ocities, including the murder of civilians, predominantly Jews and Poles under the Nazi German administration. The term Banderites was also used by the Bandera followers themselves, and by others during the Holocaust, and the massacres of Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by OUN-UPA in 19431944.The zionists have been asking hard for a backlash: https://katehon.com/article/riding-tiger-zionism-israel-and-far-right
[MORE]Mefobills , says: December 20, 2019 at 7:00 pm GMT
@Digital Samizdat and infest England, is not well understood by the average Goy.Mefobills , says: December 20, 2019 at 7:12 pm GMTOur modern world is a direct line back to this big-bang event. Christian Zionism goes back much further in time than to just Cyrus Scofield and Darby. Our Jewish friends in Amsterdam were even publishing bibles at great expense, to then push the narrative that the "people of god and old testament" deserve to return to England.
(The usurers had been previously kicked out of England by King Edward in 1290. The usurers had been plying their game, and "putting house to house" to where English citizens were being dispossessed from their own lands.)
Sound familiar?
@Anonymouse y Jewish as were the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they have greatly benefited from the political immunity provided by this totally bizarre inversion of historical reality. Partly as a consequence of their media-fabricated victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over much of our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war with nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that unfortunate goal, they will surely outdo the very impressive human body-count racked up by their ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an order-of-magnitude or more.ANZ , says: December 20, 2019 at 9:34 pm GMT@Mefobills ted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.Aided by no small part by chutzpah. The uncanny ability to ability to call black white and to call good evil. With no cultural love of truth to anchor them in reality. Thus detached, they are free to invent an alternate reality. I wonder if they do not suffer from cognitive dissonance. They seem genetically protected from it.
They are actually self-deluded and want to infect the rest of us with their visions of victimhood.
Long live the internet
alex in San Jose AKA digital Detroit , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:04 pm GMT
@Mefobillseah , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:21 pm GMTNot saying fellow Whites haven't helped me out, but Jews have, out of proportion to their numbers in the population by far.
I'm not sure how tons of Nobel prizes, advances in medicine, etc are "destroying everything they touch".
There was nothing done to my family to make them cold, short-sighted, selfish bastards. That's just White culture for ya.
@Realist ; votes these greedy corrupt politicians into office? Hint: It is Whites who are the majority.Mefobills , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:24 pm GMTMy first comment to you was #256 -- again "for the record": I did not give enough of a damn about you or your idiotic statement ("Stupid Whites are responsible for allowing this to happen") to comment/reply to you before you mentioned voting .
"LOL"
And I don't appreciate it when people attribute specific words, views, or thoughts to me that I did not express -- make a note of it, asshole.
You fucking prick.
@Thomasina ich changed the meaning of the Statue.Mefobills , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:40 pm GMTDescendants of this immigration wave are the liberal jews pushing the jew coup against Trump. This is why they are from Ukraine (former pale of settlement area) or Russian haters.
To my mind, Trump is a Christian Zionist and has naturally allied with Bibi and the Zionist religious factions, such as Chabbad/Likkud.
Since U.S. has been fully infiltrated, then having Mossad and its agents on your side, is a strategy to keep from being suicided by the deep state, like JFK.
I'm willing to give Trump some lee-way, given the circumstances of our current reality.
@alex in San Jose AKA digital Detroit n pale of the settlement, or in Polish Shtetls, they created nothing of import.Druid , says: December 20, 2019 at 10:52 pm GMTOnly when operating within the confines of Western Christian culture, or forced into western education by the Tsars, did Jews break free to be productive. And even then that production came at high cost to the host societies.
In other words, a good argument can be made, that if Jews had never infiltrated into Western Civilization, then said Westerners would have been much better off.
Sorry if real history is butt-hurting.
Today's Iran is another model on how to deal with the Jew problem. Jews are limited there in the same way as was done in Byzantium.
@sallyDigital Samizdat , says: December 20, 2019 at 11:03 pm GMTYour Jewish friends are, as they're wont to be, Zionist talmudists liars!!
@Colin Wright ow" href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/18/impeachment-what-lies-beneath/">over at CounterPunchArt , says: December 20, 2019 at 11:03 pm GMTSo here's my entirely speculative tea-leaf reading: If there's a hidden agenda behind the urgency to remove Trump, one that might actually garner the votes of Republican Senators, it is to replace him with a president who will be a more reliable and effective leader for a military attack on Iran that Israel wants to initiate before next November. Spring is the cruelest season for launching wars.
His story is that the Israelis consider Pence to be more reliable. Who knows
@Digital Samizdat Pelosi is a figurehead controlled by AIPAC.annamaria , says: December 21, 2019 at 1:28 am GMTThe most important committee chairmanships to Israeli interests, are all held by Jews.
Nita Lowey Appropriations Committee
Adam Schiff Intelligence Committee
Jerrold Nadler Judiciary Committee
Eliot Engel Foreign Affairs CommitteeThis ploy of holding back the impeachment documents sounds like something crazy Schiff would do.
I think that there is something mentally and culturally wrong with that guy he has zero regard for truthfulness.
Pelosi has trashed her legacy. That's what happens when you get close to the Jews.
@ANZ 11/13/the-psychopathology-of-being-jewish-and-getting-away-with-it/"> https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/the-psychopathology-of-being-jewish-and-getting-away-with-it/annamaria , says: December 21, 2019 at 1:49 am GMTNo wonder that the majority of Jews do not want to live in the Jewish State. too many Jews there.
They are quetching about antisemitism while attacking the western civilization -- from the assault on the First Amendment to the cheerleading for more wars for Israel in the Middle East.No one keeps the Jews from joining their brethren in Israel. There is no need to sing "Next year in Jerusalem." Enough already. Just go there -- and stay there.
@alex in San Jose AKA digital Detroit o humanity, the Jewish style.Buddy , says: December 21, 2019 at 2:34 am GMT@Mefobills ons that distract us from seeing the top of the pyramid. However, it would appear that Marx finally gets to finance in Volume Three of Capital. I could read the whole thing myself, but I would rather simply ask you what you think. How do you reconcile Marx the Illuminati Jewish agent with Marx the perspicacious critic of capitalism? Where were his real loyalties? Did he stick the dynamite at the end of his magnum opus instead of at the beginning in order to hide it from his finance masters, whom he knew would never actually read that far? Was he attempting to assuage a guilty conscience by sneaking the truth into a footnote?ANZ , says: December 21, 2019 at 3:31 am GMT@annamaria are quetching about antisemitism while attacking the western civilization -- from the assault on the First Amendment to the cheerleading for more wars for Israel in the Middle East.The complete lack of shame it takes to act like this is amazing to me. Also the hubris it would take. Though if you see yourself as a chosenite, those behaviors fit.
Apparently if you hang around then long enough, the behavior is contagious. Biden's shady Ukrainian dealings, which are 100% real are being denied and instead projected onto Trump. It's infecting our politics. The shabbos goy are emulating their masters.
Colin Wright , says: Website December 21, 2019 at 3:49 am GMT
@sallyAchilles Wannabe , says: December 21, 2019 at 4:48 am GMT'before I do, you must define venture capital.'
Vulture capital, actually. How many gentiles you can name in that category?
@redmudhooch ts since the cave but that is not capitalism. Capitalism is Usury profit for the sake of profit independent of usefulness, welfare, community, lifestyle.Daniel Rich , says: December 21, 2019 at 4:51 am GMT
.
And as was argued by the great German economist/sociologist Werner Sombart, Capitalism was really invented by Jews However as E Michael Jones has argued, Protestantism particularly Anglo Calvinism- was a backsliding of Christianity into Jewish materialism the spiritual basis for capitalism. So everything seemingly goes around and around. Capitalism cannot be blamed solely on the Jews but Jews can never be abstracted from the evils of capitalism. We have to keep both balls in the air@BuddyAchilles Wannabe , says: December 21, 2019 at 4:53 am GMTGrab a small piece of paper. Add some fancy, symbolic stuff to it, like a fire-breathing dragon, with big, burning eyes, named ' Nimajneb , the faerie overlord, that hovers over an upside-down pyramid. Oh, and you'll need a number, let's say, '100.' Done. Print it out. Walk to the nearest person, say, "I've got here a $100 bill," and see what happens
Yet, the FED can take the same little piece of paper, sprinkle some magic dust on it, et voilΰ, you've got your $100 greenback [aka IOU $100 banknote].
Money makes the world go round?
Spin out of control into a state of utter madness, I'd say.
@redmudhoochMefobills , says: December 21, 2019 at 5:26 am GMTInteresting argument. Please see my comment -# 313
@Buddy can read through economic history or texts and spot the lies and fakery. So where does that leave the average layman to turn and not be hoaxed?Miggle , says: December 21, 2019 at 11:16 am GMTSorry it is so hard out there to navigate. I commend you for trying. I'm feeling pressure to write a book, because even Hudson does not initiate people from level zero up to someone advanced enough to resist the hoaxers.
Richard Werner is pretty good, but you have to navigate around his favoritism of private banking. Money is law.. and he doesn't want to acknowledge that. This is what you run into, and the only way is for you to navigate as best you can and see if things ring true.
@ArtNonny Mouse , says: December 21, 2019 at 11:27 am GMTThis ploy of holding back the impeachment documents sounds like something crazy Schiff would do.
I think that there is something mentally and culturally wrong with that guy he has zero regard for truthfulness.
Wrong? Zero regard for truthfulness is mentally and culturally right for Schiffty. Very Jewish. The right way, if one is Jewish.
@anno nimusNonny Mouse , says: December 21, 2019 at 11:35 am GMTI think Talmud means Pentateuch, not O.T.
@Nonny MouseAnon [388] Disclaimer , says: December 21, 2019 at 11:46 am GMTSorry, I meat Torah, not Talmud. You called the Torah the O.T. It's only the first few books of the O.T., I think.
@Achilles Wannabe moral framework informing their behaviour.Robjil , says: December 21, 2019 at 12:02 pm GMTReal science has been suppressed and removed from the public sphere. Or it's been perverted for mass surveillance and social command and control and dual systems.
I fully believe that execrable demons like Soros never die because they're getting baby blood from orphans passed through some heinous engine into their vile bodies.
Meanwhile, we're forced to deal with nonsense like anthropogenic climate change, string theory, dark matter and other Jewry the sole purpose of which is to centralise power over mind and body in the hand of Jews and Masons.
The Capitalist Jew is the Science Jew.
The answer to both is the same.
George , says: December 21, 2019 at 12:39 pm GMTPoland created Askenazis by inviting them in 1025. They grew from 25,000 to the millions we have today all over the world.
Yet, now the Ashkenazi tribe wants to stick it to Poland for creating them.
The Zionist racial bigotry behind S447 was foreshadowed by Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress in 1996:
"More than 3 million Jews died in Poland and Poles will not be the heirs of Polish Jews. We will never allow it. We will harass them until Poland is ice covered again. If Poland fails to satisfy Jewish demands, it will be publicly humiliated and attacked internationally . secretary general of the World Jewish Congress"
Notice the guy's last name Singer. This is another form of Jewish mafia vulture capitalism, using any means to hurt the masses.
What is S447?
Section 3 of Act 447, the provision for heirless property, is the part that reveals the law's intent. Under existing laws, heirless property becomes the property of the state. After WW2 there was a lot of property without owners (whether owned by Poles or Jews), and it has been sold ever since. This law has the potential to cause national havoc, as the vast majority of Poles own their own homes. Even in the relatively cosmopolitan capital of Warsaw, 79% of city-dwellers own their homes and apartments.
Under S447, any Polish-Jew or descendent of said Polish Jew can lay claim to property to property deemed heirless and sold after the war, thus all land that can be claimed to have been owned by Jews before 1939 will be transferred to the global Jewish diaspora. If this law is put into practice, approximately 30% of Warsaw homeowners will be forced to pay "rent" to random Jews claiming to be Holocaust survivors or their descendants in New York City and Tel Aviv.
How would this "law" work in Poland?
Under S447, any Polish-Jew or descendent of said Polish Jew can lay claim to property to property deemed heirless and sold after the war, thus all land that can be claimed to have been owned by Jews before 1939 will be transferred to the global Jewish diaspora. If this law is put into practice, approximately 30% of Warsaw homeowners will be forced to pay "rent" to random Jews claiming to be Holocaust survivors or their descendants in New York City and Tel Aviv.
Trump was "impeached" for not giving arms freely to ZUS controlled Ukraine. The arms have been used to shell and kill civilians in East Ukraine. Yet, Trump should be impeached for pushing this Jewish Mafia vulture like capitalism on Poland.
Pressure from the US government is only reason this law is even being considered. While Donald Trump appeals to the West and Polish patriotism in his speeches, his government's actions say something radically different. Last February, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanded the Polish state pass this law. Last August, the American congress urged more pressure on the Polish state to get S447 through.
mcohen , says: December 21, 2019 at 12:40 pm GMT"Tucker Carlson's recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer's vulture fund"
Yup, the bricks and mortar outdoor gear shops, Cabela's + Bass Pro need 2 HQs. Nebraska could have stopped it but instead chose farm subsidies, forever war, and pensions for government workers. To have that much spending excess in the government spending you need high efficiency from the civilian sector.
The reaction in Nebraska seems to be a big yawn. My guess is Cabela was constantly trying to reduce their state and local taxes, at some point keeping the low wage retail jobs while dumping the high wage HQ jobs made sense, short term, so they sold Sidney NB down the river.
Candidate targets Sasse on Sidney response, other issues
"Nobody tried anything," was the compaint(sic) Innis heard on his visits to the struggling community.
https://www.mccookgazette.com/story/2656650.html
REI is probably safe as it is a Consumers' co-operative.
annamaria , says: December 21, 2019 at 1:31 pm GMTMefo says
"Forces jews into honorable laboring professions"
That is funny.I feel a laugh coming on.
Well mefo let me tell you a funny story.This guy i know made some nasty comments about jews and not long after he got cancer.His doctor,a jewish cancer specialist put him back on his feet.
Know what the funny part is.He still makes the same comments.From an article in the jew york times
Few escaped the pervasive prejudice, however. In the early 1900s, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a German Jew who discovered a treatment for syphilis and is considered the father of chemotherapy, popularized the term "magic bullet" to describe a medical compound that would "aim exclusively at the dangerous intruding parasites" yet not "touch the organism itself."
But though Dr. Ehrlich was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1908, he was not made a full professor at a university until 1914, a year before he died. (That posting was at the University of Frankfurt, in the year of its founding.) In the 1930s, as the Nazis came to power, his name was removed from textbooks and taken off Frankfurt's street signs. Paul-Ehrlich-Strasse regained its name only after World War II.
@ANZ of bankers and religious fanatics or a land-based theocratic toy-state of Israel.annamaria , says: December 21, 2019 at 1:43 pm GMTIt is the spirit of parasitism that is "infectious" and works against patriotism. Hense the local profiteers, from Rumsfeld to McCain, Biden, Brennan, Pelosi, Rubio and the likes who have been hastening the demise of the US for the immediate monetary compensation tied to the allegiance to the Jewish cause. The zionized NYT and the presstituting stink tanks the Atlantic Council (affiliated with the openly subversive Integrity Initiative), American Enterprise Institute and such have been working openly against the US interests and for ziocon interests.
@Mefobillsannamaria , says: December 21, 2019 at 1:49 pm GMT"Herzyl admired the Germans of the day, and wanted Jews to be like the German's he so admired. Herzyl thought that if Jews had their own country of Zion, they would settle down and become normal people."
-- The dream was an illusion. When the meme "is it good for the Jew?" beats all and any moral principles, then the world gets a nation of thieves and murderers quetching non-stop about their eternal victimhood. Pathetic.
http://www.thehypertexts.com/Israeli%20Prime%20Ministers%20Terrorists%20Nakba.htm
annamaria , says: December 21, 2019 at 5:25 pm GMThttp://www.thehypertexts.com/Israeli%20Prime%20Ministers%20Terrorists%20Nakba.htm
[MORE]@mcohen spot.com/2012/10/czech-activists-accused-madeleine.html#moreFvS , says: December 21, 2019 at 6:44 pm GMTFrom the position of the USA Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright pushed for the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, when NATO planes bombed without a UN mandate. She also supported the jihad in Bosnia during 1992-1995, and the manipulation of the facts about Srebrenica, but also personally earned from the privatization of Kosovo Telecommunications. She should, therefore, bear the consequences of her political decisions and acknowledge responsibility for the bloodshed, in which thousands of civilians were killed.
@lavoisierMr. Anon , says: December 21, 2019 at 7:32 pm GMTBut in fairness, the Koch brothers are no damn good for the nation either.
No, they are (were) not. However, they also got a lot of negative media attention while these Jewish vulture capitalists have mostly been given a pass. Also, whites are about 55% of the population while Jews are about 2%.
Mefobills , says: December 21, 2019 at 7:52 pm GMT@silviosilver er because the debt was already in default or was at imminent risk of defaulting, which is why the debt sells at a heavy discount, since existing debt holders are often happy to sell cheap and get something rather than hold on and risk getting nothing.If A enters into a contract with B to borrow money, and then fails to be pay it back to B, why should C be able to come in and buy the debt from B and expect to be paid back? A entered into a contract with B, not C. And why should C expect to be able to employ the machinery of state coercion to force A to honor a contract that A didn't even make with C in the first place? Mr. Anon , says: December 21, 2019 at 7:37 pm GMT
@Colin WrightIt's important not to get carried away with this.
I agree. Mitt Romney was also a financial hustler. The over-representation is real, but not exclusive.
@Thales the Milesian ters sent representatives to a small central government. This form of government was usurped in 1913, by the "money powers," and these money powers use elections as a veneer to sanction their behind the scenes rule.Mefobills , says: December 21, 2019 at 8:10 pm GMTHere is another quote from the Ivan the Terrible article, which sums things up:
n 1601, just a few years after Ivan's death, Russia was starving, leaderless and under attack. Again, under elite rule, with no ruling monarch, Russia was plunged into years of war and violence. Fighting oligarchy has been the traditional job of any monarch and is the ultimate purpose of government.
@Robjil olves to the "were so smart" and look at the medical advances, nobel prizes, etc. we've contributed.niceland , says: December 21, 2019 at 8:11 pm GMTConveniently left out of account, is that these advances would have been done anyway in their absence. The goyim do possess the intelligence and fortitude to solider on without jews in our midst, and in-fact, when jews are absent from our civilizations, advancement accelerates.
The best thing for a jew to do is turn his back on the tribe, and re-join humanity.
To any Jew reading this . walk away from the tribe. Man-up and get some intestinal fortitude, leave the parasite method behind you, and join humanity.
@MefobillsMefobills , says: December 21, 2019 at 8:27 pm GMTI'm feeling pressure to write a book, because even Hudson does not initiate people from level zero up to someone advanced enough to resist the hoaxers.
Have you considered writing articles? Series of articles could later on become raw material for a book. Perhaps easier path to take and could perhaps provide useful feedback along the way.
It sure looks like you could write far more informative and interesting articles than many writers here on Unz because of your broad perspective. The big picture is always more interesting and I agree with you about the importance of the subject.
@Mr. Anon d by these degenerate types of people in order to take illicit gains.ThreeCranes , says: December 21, 2019 at 9:37 pm GMTIn the U.S., (I'm an American), these usury flows funnel into the press to where the press becomes owned, so that these Oligarchic interests can continue to take rents and unearned income through their various schemes.
I might add, our intelligent UNZ readers, have noticed that the U.S. mainstream press is predominantly Jewish owned. Intelligent people notice patterns are some of us are unwilling to look away. No amount of deception through the mainstream press can reduce the revulsion moral people instinctively feel when watching vultures operate.
@Bookish1 ing whiteness has never been more urgent.' By Mark Levine"mark green , says: December 21, 2019 at 9:53 pm GMTWhen challenged for apparently encouraging genocide, Levine and his cronies answer that "whiteness", as they are employing the term, is merely an accidental property as opposed to an essential quality. So stripping an organism of its whiteness will not diminish it to any significant degree, does not threaten its very existence, merely prunes it into a more acceptable shape.
And yet when some poor misguided soul has the temerity to put up a sign saying "It's Okay To Be White", the Mark Levines of the world have a cow. Suddenly, "white" is not a mere accidental quality at all.
@FvSBuddy , says: December 21, 2019 at 11:50 pm GMTThe Koch Brothers (what's left of them; one died recently) are industrialists. They build things people want. They are innovators. Yes, the Koch Brothers are filthy rich but they employ tens of thousands of people in the US alone.
Most importantly, the Koch Bros. are not parasitic, money-skimming extractors or wealth like the vulture capitalists described by Joyce.
@Mefobills s and schemes. The advantage of their technique is that it does not leave a positive trace but a negative trace. It is much more difficult to notice absence than presence. You can't see all the money that is constantly being vacuumed out of the economy. It doesn't leave a visible hole. And since none of us has ever witnessed firsthand what a rent-free economy might actually look like (since they are not allowed to exist), we internalize the belief that such an economy goes against natural law, when in fact the contrary is true.mcohen , says: December 21, 2019 at 11:52 pm GMTIs there any way for you to link to more of your writing without giving away your identity?
@mcohen class="comment-text">Mefobills , says: December 21, 2019 at 11:52 pm GMTMefo
Lol
Ah so you're a team.interesting.protecting the ween.
How about this paul ehrlich.next generation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist, best known for his warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources.[2][3] He is the Bing Professor of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.
@Thales the Milesianmcohen , says: December 22, 2019 at 12:01 am GMTStraw man argument. I am not for democracy or human rights. Apparently you don't want to let go of your false worldview.
@mark green dding.Stop posting on unz,its for adults only.Wally , says: December 22, 2019 at 12:11 am GMThttp://www.newyorker.com
A Whistle-Blower Accuses the Kochs of "Poisoning" an Arkansas Townhttp://www.rollingstone.com
Web results
David Koch Built a Toxic Empire -- with Human Consequenceshttps://m.huffpost.com entry
Koch Brothers' Toxic Legacy Detailed In New Report | HuffPostReid right on claiming Kochs produce more pollution than oil giants
@Achilles WannabeDaniel Rich , says: December 22, 2019 at 12:19 am GMTDon't like a product or service that a "capitalist" makes or offers?
Fine & dandy, don't buy it, don't pay for it.
It's called choice .
There is no choice under your preferred Communism, as we have seen repeatedly.
@RobjilDingo jay b , says: Website December 22, 2019 at 12:20 am GMTUnder S447, any Polish-Jew or descendent of said Polish Jew can lay claim to property to property deemed heirless and sold after the war, thus all land that can be claimed to have been owned by Jews before 1939 will be transferred to the global Jewish diaspora.
Let's make a variant of the Polish S447 applicable to Palestinians and find out how much the illegal occupiers of Palestine like to see 'justice.'
Mefobills , says: December 22, 2019 at 12:42 am GMTTo be brief :Wasn't. Singer originally behind the dossier on Trump?
@mcohen eir factories full of low IQ but compliant workers. 3) The finance banking class who want new debts to pay off old debts. New Debtors help fund a new debt cycle. 4) New people through population replacement, destroy the history and cohesion of the host country. By de-racinating and destroying the host people, then Plutocrats can continue with their thefts unchallenged.anon [415] Disclaimer , says: December 22, 2019 at 12:46 am GMTThe debt money cycle is something like a pyramid, where it sucks upward toward plutocracy. Plutocrats and Oligarchs then emit hypnosis and propaganda through the owned press to maintain their status. The funnel, or bottom of the pyramid wants new debts and new debtors.
@Father O'HaraRobjil , says: December 22, 2019 at 12:55 am GMThow do entities like Puerto Rico get so far in debt in the first place? so many problems because of what appeared to be incompetent and comatose government.
Yes, ultimately the blame must lie with the voters: they picked douche, when they should have picked turd.
@Daniel Rich l, Germany and Russia were both strangled. The US's turn is now. The US wants to strangle Poland too with this s447 law. Trump should have been impeached for pushing this law on Poland.anon [415] Disclaimer , says: December 22, 2019 at 12:58 am GMT
Pressure from the US government is only reason this law is even being considered. While Donald Trump appeals to the West and Polish patriotism in his speeches, his government's actions say something radically different. Last February, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanded the Polish state pass this law. Last August, the American congress urged more pressure on the Polish state to get S447 through.
@Svevlad uple of centuries, nearly took Europe too, and were a serious thorn in everyone's side for a thousand yearsMefobills , says: December 22, 2019 at 1:03 am GMTIn other words, they did much better than the Jews over the same period
Ball-breaking is a viable strategy, apparently
I think that all afroasiatic-speaking populations are like this, if they were to gain in intelligence the world would get weird real fast
Nah, no danger: it's just first-mover advantage, which, by definition, can belong only to one entity
Things went a little differently two thousand years ago, people like Joyce could just as easily have been writing about Kurds or Alawites or whatever
Mefobills , says: December 22, 2019 at 1:36 am GMTBuddy,
The real eureka moment for me came when I finally understood that money and debt were created at the same time on opposite sides of the ledger. Only the two columns are not equal. One column grows through magic while the other does not. Once the sorcery has been wrought, the creditors can simply sit back and wait as the mechanism eventually transfers all the wealth in the world to them.
That is pretty good. Economics and most equations do not codify time. The equal sign cannot comprehend time, so most of the math used in economics textbooks is telling lies.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, the bad guys put their thumb on the scale and call things equal. They do this with swaps of unlike kinds. For example, you can build up housing prices with bubble economics, then collapse the economy by preventing new loans, or doing call-in loans. That then forces prices downward. The bankster/vulture class then forces a swap of the asset to collapse (cancel) the debt instrument. In this case, the house is transferred to creditor to erase debts. The house transfers to collapse a money contract, which is a swap of unlike kinds. Vultures do the same thing, they don't necessarily want money in exchange for the debt instrument they have bought.
With regards to double entry hypothecation at the first instance of time, when debt instrument is signed ONLY THEN IS IT A MIRROR. The credit created and the debt claims are 1:1 only at the instant (minus fees). Later in time, the debt claims grow while the credit created does not. This is why debt claims destroy the natural world, as people rape the world converting forests to board feet of lumber, to then make a price, to then fetch money.
In the first cycles of a loan it is ALL USURY. Worse it is seignorage. Seignorage is greater purchasing power now, whereas the money is worth less later.
In the first cycles of the loan, the bank credit that you pay back, virtually none of it goes to paying off principle. The credit decrements the asset side of your ledger (your savings go down) and then point at the banker, to increase the asset side of his ledger. In the first cycles of the loan, your liability column (principle on the loan) goes down only slightly or not at all.
This is pure usury, plain and simple. There is little to risk the loan emitter either, as a house is fungible and can be grabbed by law. If a real asset is attached to the double entry ledger, it is to lower risk to the creditor (banker), not the debtor. A double entry ledger can lie, or tell the truth. It would tell the truth if we used fees in this case and didn't hypothecate new credit. But, then again, as you mention most people are locked into a hypnotic trance.
The proper way to do things is with sovereign money, not private corporate bank money at usury.
Whenever a nations people demand their sovereignty, they are attacked by the usual suspects. A lot of people don't want to admit that both world wars were started by the finance class, with Jews as leading agents, to then demonize Germany.
Germany had the temerity under the Kaiser to run an Industrial Capitalist Mixed Economy using its own sovereign credit, and then Hitler resurrected this system in 1933.
@mcohen9/11 Inside job , says: December 22, 2019 at 1:40 am GMTHow about this paul ehrlich.next generation
Oh, sorry a different Paul Ehrlich.
You are only making my point. If a jew is in an honorable profession, he can be of benefit to the host society.
Maybe Jews should also be limited from the press too, so they may not have a malign influence on easily duped goyim minds.
But then, I don't want to lose the brave and honorable Jews like Ron Unz who are for the truth of things, even if it is damaging to their co-ethnics.
Bookish1 , says: December 22, 2019 at 1:41 am GMTrenegadetribune.com ; "US Court sentences Israeli CEO to 22 years for scamming Americans , media ignore it ":
"The company specifically targeted the elderly and the vulnerable , one of over 100 companies perpetrating a scam called binary options Israel permitted the scam to go on for a decade "
Will Trump pardon him before he leaves office ? The Jerusalem Post : " Trump pardons Israeli drug smuggler" after serving just 4 years of a 20 year sentence .
@ThomasinaBookish1 , says: December 22, 2019 at 1:51 am GMTTo get it straight: Trump is playing their game but not totally. He isn't invading Iran so the globalists aren't getting everything that they want.
@Digital SamizdatHibernian , says: December 22, 2019 at 2:31 am GMTMaybe the dems want Trump in because they see a world war coming and the Republicans in for that.
@Mr. AnonLot , says: December 22, 2019 at 3:11 am GMTContracts often have provisions for successors and assignees. The real question is whether the weaker party was sufficiently strong to know what they were signing and have a good chance of being able to carry out their side of the bargain. Many sovereign buyers are about as good risk as an unemployed man who wants to buy a car on credit.
@silviosilverDesert Fox , says: December 22, 2019 at 3:28 am GMTI agree this is a real problem, but no need to exaggerate. It isn't 99%. Outside of the USA, it is probably well under half.
@9/11 Inside jobKA , says: December 22, 2019 at 4:32 am GMTTrump will do anything his zionist masters tell him to do, I am sure they have enough videos of Trump to last a lifetime.
@Just passing through countries have been looted, the Jews have turned on the Whites and the latter are now crying that their criminal comrades have now betrayed them."mcohen , says: December 22, 2019 at 4:39 am GMTIt's called comeuppance.
But IQ doesn't explain fully but the readiness to believe the west . Congo is particularly a sad case. It has been fighting a war for last 60 years .
As far as Belgium is concerned, that nations should be swamped to the brim with Congolese making it burst at the seams .
Who cares if some moronic Trump supporters get all shook up in Battle Creek . Who gives a toss ?
Trump is a fraud , a huckster a corrupt filthy white thrash
@geokat62 iven the environmental damage said industries have caused. The vulture capitalists recover debt from failed states. A worthy cause indeed, especially for investors.hotrod31 , says: December 22, 2019 at 8:03 am GMTmark green says:
December 21, 2019 at 9:53 pm GMT 100 Words@FvS
The Koch Brothers (what's left of them; one died recently) are industrialists. They build things people want. They are innovators. Yes, the Koch Brothers are filthy rich but they employ tens of thousands of people in the US alone.Most importantly, the Koch Bros. are not parasitic, money-skimming extractors or wealth like the vulture capitalists described by Joyce.
@Colin Wrightgeokat62 , says: December 22, 2019 at 2:20 pm GMTShould one suspect that your last question is, rhetorical? Quite, i'm sure.
@mcohen ly able to secure large amounts of debt at very favourable interest rates. But this very soon changed. The vultures at GS, after peering into the Greece's true financial records, knew how vulnerable Greek finances were and were betting heavily against Greek sovereign debt by shorting it. This soon drove borrowing rates sky high which made it nearly impossible for the Greek govt to roll over their short term debt obligations.ANZ , says: December 22, 2019 at 3:08 pm GMTSo, thanks to the vulture capitalists at GS, a large percentage of the Greek population has been suffering and will continue to suffer under the austerity policies that were introduced in the wake of the financial crises.
@annamaria d us out from the classic American tradition into the modern Zionist vision. These turncoats are a uniquely despicable lot since they come with smiles and handshakes to kill the soul of our nation.Thales the Milesian , says: December 22, 2019 at 6:20 pm GMTIf history serves as a guide, it will take a government led by s strongman to right this ship. Democracy has proven too easily corruptible by a private banking cartel that can print its way to dominance. This cartel will select, groom, install and maintain their double agents into our political, economic and cultural spheres.
Here is the most plain lesson I can take from this: don't allow privatized money as the national currency.
@MefobillsThales the Milesian , says: December 22, 2019 at 6:35 pm GMTI know you are not. Go and tell that to the World. Stop preaching democracy, and other crap.
Mr. Singer will prosper as this is the will of the American people and you can do nothing to change that.
@Thales the Milesianmcohen , says: December 22, 2019 at 8:10 pm GMTBy the way Mefobills people like you are the problem. Sitting on your butt, doing nothing and whining.
@geokat62Robjil , says: December 22, 2019 at 8:57 pm GMTGeo you cannot bullshit me.i am teflonika. Retitrement age was 55 but now it is 67.
Great people.Failed state."They"stole his money.lol http://www.ekathimerini.com/218552/article/ekathimerini/community/they-stole-my-money-greek-dreams-of-retirement-turn-sour
@mcohen oycott abroad. It did this by using a barter system: equipment and commodities were exchanged directly with other countries, circumventing the international banks. This system of direct exchange occurred without debt and without trade deficits. Germany's economic experiment, like Lincoln's, was short-lived; but it left some lasting monuments to its success, including the famous Autobahn, the world's first extensive superhighway.1Greece or any nation need not be in "debt". It is a game, a game of money printed out of thin air. All Greece has to do, is give up the debt game. Barter game is a better game.
MrFoSquare , says: December 22, 2019 at 10:42 pm GMT
@Buddy three.Mefobills , says: December 23, 2019 at 1:13 am GMTRoger Elletson, in his excellent book "Money: A Medium of Power"(Amazon), defines the purpose of usury: "Under the current monetary regime, the effect, and indeed the purpose, of usury is to create compounding (think 'little by little') monetary claims from usurers against the productive output and underlying assets of nations."
In his unpublished manuscript, "The Triumph of Western Civilization," Elletson says: "What Parapometrics© now reveals, however, is that usury is the ultimate expression of parasitic (or mammonic) monetary law; it is the life principle of satanic power and human parasitism."
@Robjil n proportion to the economies needs, as is what happened in Germany. Hitler laughed at the gold-men, and considered gold money as a tool used by the Jews in their "international capital game."NoseytheDuke , says: December 23, 2019 at 1:16 am GMTPurchasing power was put into the German economy using Oeffa and Mefo bills. When the bills were discounted (redeemed) at a bank, said bank turned around and presented the bills to the Central Bank (Reichsbank). Reichsbank then created new Reichsmarks to pay off the Bills. In this way millions of marks of new credit flooded into the German economy. By 1938 the tax roles in Germany had almost tripled, and it was not due to Gold or "international credit."
@Thales the MilesianRobjil , says: December 23, 2019 at 2:00 am GMTAll that you and I really know about Mefobills is that information about the nature of money and economics is being freely given and appears to be much appreciated according to other commenters. We don't know anything about what other activities Mefobills is engaged in so your comment is nonsense thinly disguised as petty insults.
@Mefobills ding began.5Caruthers , says: December 23, 2019 at 2:47 am GMTIn Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People (1984), Sheldon Emry commented:
Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today.
@Colin WrightCaruthers , says: December 23, 2019 at 2:54 am GMTThe underdog in Israel are Palestinians. The Chosen, in Israel and elsewhere, treat them like vermin. The Israeli chosen are the most color-conscious and racist people in the Western world.
@mcohenAchilles Wannabe , says: December 23, 2019 at 3:21 am GMTWhat benefit did the vulture capitalists give to the Greek people that they must now pay for with austerity?
@Just passing throughAchilles Wannabe , says: December 23, 2019 at 3:46 am GMTI would say WASP's and Jews savaged Germany in WW2. Perhaps then the Jews turned on the WASPS. But WASP's are a curious bunch. They seem to have absolutely no loyalty to their own people. Look at what they have done to the English white working class. WASP's also are very enamored of Jews. If anything their loyalty sees to be to the Jews and not their own
ivan , says: December 23, 2019 at 3:48 am GMT"we should ditch the word capitalism for usuryism."
Best idea I've heard in awhile. Likewise change Economics Departments to Usury Departments at least in the Anglo=Judeo Sphere
@Nonny Mousemcohen , says: December 23, 2019 at 4:43 am GMTThat may be the case in the Exodus dramas but the idea of 'who is thy brother' was already made clear earlier in Genesis the story of Abel and Cain. The later Jews and the Christians merely rediscovered what was the original plan : that is, that all mankind share one brotherhood under one God.
@MrFoSquareCaruthers , says: December 23, 2019 at 7:44 am GMTMr 4
Aah so more bullshit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loans_and_interest_in_Judaism
@mcohenBuddy , says: December 23, 2019 at 11:53 am GMTSo the Greek debt was caused by the purchase of too many weapons to defend against other countries like Turkey in NATO, an American-led organization that promises to provide security to all its member states? So the populace of a treaty-bound ally should suffer US-enforced austerity to have weapons so that vulture capitalists can enjoy large profits which they largely funnel to Jewish causes while the Jewish state never is expected to suffer austerity for weapons?
@MrFoSquare . The texts are diabolically equivocal and ingeniously interlocking. The exoteric interpretation is innocent (Torah) and full of plausible deniability, the esoteric interpretation is malevolent (Talmud), and the ultra-esoteric interpretation (Kabbalah) is Satanic. At the very bottom you have the ultimate esoteric language of gematria. The good news is that it is easy to see through the necromancy once you understand how money magic functions. But this is only possible if we refuse the temptation of greed. We have not done a very good job of resisting greed, and those of us who succumb to this temptation deserve to be swindled.Just passing through , says: December 23, 2019 at 1:28 pm GMT@Achilles Wannabe re to be Jewish, people like Joyce would be on the case saying it was all da jooz, but he isn't very keen to blame WASPs for the black-on-white violence in American public schools, makes ya wonder.Hibernian , says: December 23, 2019 at 1:50 pm GMTWASP's also are very enamored of Jews. If anything their loyalty sees to be to the Jews and not their own
Jews have always been present in the elite, WASPs identify with Jews because they identfy with the elite. I am quite sure even to this day, WASPs and Jews are working together, it is just that the lower rungs of White society are being overwhelmed first and it seems unlikely that these North-Eastern WASPs will feel the pain any time soon.
@Achilles WannabeGeorge F. Held , says: Website December 23, 2019 at 2:00 pm GMTNew England Neo-Calvinists never saw Southern and Border Anglo-Celts as brothers. Not at all. Thus the Civil War. As for their closer kin, poorer Mayflower, etc., descendants, they mixed in with Germans, Scandinavians, and, horror of horrors, the Irish, as they moved West. Bing Crosby was a Mayflower descendant.
@Truth3silviosilver , says: December 23, 2019 at 8:31 pm GMTTrump is a bad president for the reasons you cite, but neither Pence nor any demorat would be better. So let him be
@eah conclusions?Joyce's conclusions -- that any of this behavior is uniquely "Jewish" -- are absurd. The facts he cites refer to no more than simply the standard operations of the market economy.
Some people just loath the very concept of credit and finance, so they reflexively praise any "analysis" which they believe justifies their anger.
Others are casting about for somebody or something to blame for their own incompetence -- the poor, downtrodden debtor "victims" -- and they too are happy to have their failings explained away.
On the substantive issues, this essay is just hot air.
silviosilver , says: December 23, 2019 at 8:39 pm GMT
@jack daniels e financial system by allowing widespread bank failures. But the banking executives whose criminal incompetence and, in some cases, corruption led to the crisis should definitely have been jailed, or at least permanently barred from ever working in the industry again. (Liberal egalitarianism shouldn't so lightly get off the hook either. After all, it is lunatic egalitarians who insisted that blacks and hispanics are just as good credit risks as whites, and who demanded that banks extend loans even to obvious deadbeats.)silviosilver , says: December 23, 2019 at 8:46 pm GMTThis is an infinitely more important issue than bellyaching about "vulture" funds and trying to portray them as uniquely Jewish.
@Wyatt what they owe in other words, to just give their money away?Caruthers , says: December 23, 2019 at 9:38 pm GMTAnd if there's a predilection among jewish men to engage in predatory lending and collecting tactics that is disproportionate to their of the population, there's something about their genes or their culture that shapes them to be this way.
Okay, but so what? Given that there's nothing immoral and much that is beneficial about lending and borrowing, why should this be any more of an issue than that west Africans genes help them excel at sportsball or east Asians genes at math and engineering?
@Just passing throughFarrakhan.DDuke.AliceWalker.AllAgree , says: December 23, 2019 at 10:35 pm GMTJewish elites are infinitely more tribal and ethnocentric than WASP elites, which is demonstrated by their charitable giving, which is far more narrowly focused on specifically Jewish causes than that of WASP elites is focused on specifically WASP causes.
Given their small numbers, Jewish elites usually must make tactical alliances with Gentile elites; but when their ethnic interests conflict with general elite interests (e.g., Marxist class conflicts), the former will almost always prevail. Hence, any WASP "loyalty" to Jews as a group is foolish.
@Mefobills this month's Executive Order Jews extracted from Trump declaring Jews to be a distinct race/nationality.renfro , says: December 24, 2019 at 1:52 am GMTUsury is a power relation, where you steal from others because you can. Laws are changed to enable the thefts.
The people of Euro lineage, i.e., the descendants of Christendom, usually don't steal even when they easily could because they are naturally indifferent as to materialism, their complimentary instinctive drives being 1) for adventure in overcoming challenges while staying within the bounds of ethical self-restraint; and 2) intellectual curiosity to learn what's out there and how to harmoniously survive and coexist with realities discovered.
@silviosilver ws: An Overview Jstorsilviosilver , says: December 24, 2019 at 2:33 am GMT
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909635
by M Amir 1971 Cited by 3 Related articles"The Jewish crime rate tends to be higher than that of non-Jews and other religious groups for white-collar offenses, that is, commercial or commercial finance.
*Also where special laws have been enacted for religious groups the crime rate among Jews tended to be even higher.
*Jews are found to be significantly over-represented in both fraudulent and genuine bankruptcies (almost ten times the rate of non-Jews)."@annamaria t's not news to me that hyperethnocentric Jewish financiers help fund hyperethnocentric Jewish organizations.silviosilver , says: December 24, 2019 at 2:45 am GMTUltimately, though, that funding is a consequence of Jewish participation in the economy. So if that in itself is wrong, then this essay is not so much a criticism of Jewish behavior, but crosses over into a criticism of Jewish existence how are you supposed to live if you're barred from economic participation? which to me is a different kettle of fish altogether. As much as I hate the term, that's something even I would call anti-semitic (note the absence of sneer quotes, which for me are practically mandatory).
@Mr. Anon er appetite for risk. See, sometimes I don't know that I'm not going to be repaid; it's just that I now assess the prospects of being repaid as failing to meet some risk criterion I have. Other people's risk assessments differ from mine, which creates a market for existing debt.Achilles Wannabe , says: December 24, 2019 at 4:59 am GMTSometimes the market highly irrationally prices financial assets most evident (in hindsight) at market peaks and troughs so there are certainly some good opportunities in distressed debt. I just don't see that "vulture" funds which scan the market looking for distressed debt are doing anything fundamentally different to any other buyers of debt.
@Hibernian ch and Germans from NY and the middle colonies like the Rockefellers Roosevelt's. Basically they are individualized deracinated people who are not even brothers to each other. They worship mammon money and power. Jews are of course anything but deracinated. They are however the world's leading usurers so the WASP with his Protestant Ethic usury sanctified is bawled over by them not just financially but psychologically. They have handed the Jews their universities, their cultural institutions. They are a people who gave themselves up to a people for whom there is no one but themselves. The rest of us are just along for the ride treacherous as it isHibernian , says: December 24, 2019 at 5:13 am GMT@silviosilverMr. Anon , says: December 24, 2019 at 5:44 am GMTI'd be very surprised if the last sentence of the above excerpt was true. Also it's a no brainer that US courts are more favorable to foreigners than third world courts are.
@silviosilverMr. Anon , says: December 24, 2019 at 5:56 am GMTA bond is a financial asset, and like other financial assets it can be bought and sold virtually at will.
Yes, but a bond is also an agreement between two parties to lend money and to pay it back.
Robjil , says: December 24, 2019 at 12:12 pm GMT@silviosilver ought legal recourse to exact repayment?No, but they shouldn't necessarily expect to get it. They took the risk in lending to a bad credit-risk. At least they provided something of value the money. Singer's fund provides nothing of value. They're just parasites.
Should they simply be forced to "lend" to people who are completely unwilling to pay what they owe in other words, to just give their money away?
Nobody forced them to lend anything. They did it of their own accord. They didn't have to make the loans. They could have done something else with the money.
Elsztain and Mindlin, both Top Jews, now control Argentina.
Elsztain and Mindlin's close connections to a merging network of some of the most powerful globalists in the world today suggest their role to be one of sniffing out the opportunities and laying the groundwork for hostile take-over of resources and infrastructure by these elite scavengers who prey upon target nations, protected from view by the likes of Elsztain and Mindlin, who are little more than mafia outreach agents."
@silviosilver nterest in relations with Israel comes as a number of Central and South American countries, notably Brazil, have adopted increasingly pro-Israel positions in line with policies of US President Donald Trump.Caruthers , says: December 24, 2019 at 9:06 pm GMTGuatemala opened a new embassy in Jerusalem al-Quds in occupied Palestine shortly after the US formally transferred its embassy from Tel Aviv to the city in May 2018, which prompted worldwide condemnation and anger among Palestinians.
In August, Honduras also recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as the the so-called capital of Israel and announced that it sought to open a diplomatic office there.
@mcohen callously don't care about the suffering they cause, or sadistically delight in it. The more distressed mortgages they can find at a discount, the more homes they can seize, the more non-co-ethnics they can render homeless, the happier they are. Like Gordon Gekko, and unlike bankers who lend money for production of goods, they don't produce anything -- -they simply parasitize the lending and borrowing of the productive economy.mcohen , says: December 24, 2019 at 9:45 pm GMT
If they are an asset to society, if their activities are a boon to society, let them practice those activities exclusively in Israel and among their own coethnics elsewhere, and contravene Talmudic injunctions.@CaruthersRobjil , says: December 24, 2019 at 11:29 pm GMT"Co ethnics" lol
Just a matter of time before the arrive in your neighborhood.They love pork in a barrel
Talmudic indeed.Take your vanilla flavoured anti semitism and piss off.
@mcohenrenfro , says: December 25, 2019 at 4:19 am GMTThat is companies in China fighting with each other. It is vulture funds on a small scale.
It not hurting or attacking struggling nations on a grand scale such as Paul Singer and his ilk does.
@silviosilverannamaria , says: December 25, 2019 at 2:36 pm GMTOkay, but so what? Given that there's nothing immoral and much that is beneficial about lending and borrowing, why should this be any more of an issue than that west Africans genes
You don't get the difference between the Jewish white collar crime and Africans being good at sports ball?
That comparison doesnt make sense.@silviosilver history of Jews in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution? The kettle and fish fit right: Mr. Snger has been financing the Holo-museums while destroying the lives of the millions in South America. Pushing the ball-point (!) written story of Anne Frank upon American kids while immiserating hundreds of thousands of Argentian kids is morally ugly. Ugly.Achilles Wannabe , says: December 26, 2019 at 2:15 am GMTAs for antisemitism, the involvement of US leading zionists, and the Jewish State itself, in supporting Ukrainian banderites (self-proclaimed neo-nazi) has buried the canard of antisemitism forever. There is no hope for the moral recovery of your Holobiz Museums and "eternal victimhood" memes.
@annamariaeah , says: December 26, 2019 at 12:55 pm GMTActually we get the Jewish version of the history of Jews in Germany as we get the Jewish version of our own history founding to Trump. It is breathtaking how Jews, Semophiles and people who are intimidated by Jews and Semophiles have created how we understand ourselves. This has been going on since Dec 7, 1941. There is almost no one left who remembers when stand up Euro Gentiles wrote history
@annamaria in a speech he gave at Brown in 1966, George Lincoln Rockwell addressed the role of Jews in the Russian Revolution -- you can listen to the speech here > Brown link -- he covers similar material in a 1967 speech at UCLA > UCLA link .Malla , says: December 26, 2019 at 5:22 pm GMTCaruthers , says: December 27, 2019 at 1:40 am GMTOne must take lessons from the great ruler Frederick the Great of Prussia about how to deal with Jewish scams. You see, Jewish scams have a long history. And most of these Jewish scamsters donate a lot of money to Jewish organisations.
Well Frederick the Great came up with a novel and effective solution to all this. He just charged the official Jewish organisations the amount in money in loss to Prussian society due to such scams. Guess What? The Jewish scams stopped. Totally stopped.
"Oy Vey" screamed the Jews, "All the money ended up in the hands of the cursed goyim and all our efforts and hard work in scamming went to waste. "
Makes me wonder if Democracy is really a better form of government than Monarchy.
@mcohenAchilles Wannabe , says: December 28, 2019 at 5:43 am GMTJoyce's article contends that the victims of these Jewish vulture capitalists are overwhelmingly goyim, while the ultimate benefactors (through their charitable donations) are Jews. You never dispute, let alone refute, this contention. However, you do contend that these vulture capitalists somehow benefit society as a whole (through some sort of economic "discipline" or whatever), but resent the suggestion that they confine this beneficial discipline (like they confine their charitable donations) to Jews, a suggestion you call "antisemitic".
@SkeptikalPlatypus jr , says: December 28, 2019 at 1:24 pm GMTYeah, that is it. In college I knew a Brahmin intimately. I was struck by the contrast between her quiet classic WASP disdain towards ordinary white conventionality and her near awe of what I thought of as Jewish vulgarity -chutzpah.
There was something ersatz Semitic in the original New England Puritanism = a sort of Jewish 1.0. Now the WASP's think the Jews are better at their game than they are. They are right of course. The question is should anyone be playing that game.
@sallysilviosilver , says: December 29, 2019 at 3:08 pm GMTZionism is a political ideology, not an economic system.
@annamariasilviosilver , says: December 29, 2019 at 3:16 pm GMTThere is no hope for the moral recovery of your Holobiz Museums and "eternal victimhood" memes.
Well, I'm not one of (((them))), so I actually hope you're proven right about this.
@Mr. Anoneah , says: December 30, 2019 at 12:53 am GMTSinger's fund provides nothing of value. They're just parasites.
We were talking about the nature of bonds. The fact bond/debt can be bought and sold does provide value it makes it more likely that the credit which business need to expand and to hire workers will be provided, and provided at a lower interest rate. So the existence of the Singers of the world, troubling as it might be to you or me (in my case, given what he does with his money), is best regarded as providing indirect value in the sense that they make our credit system possible.
@silviosilver thin air, then loaned out at interest and/or against real assets as collateral, and/or perhaps traded by 'vultures' -- or the part of the "credit system" that burdens millions of young adults with debt in the form of student loans, which ultimately is also money created out of nothing and loaned to them.Hibernian , says: December 30, 2019 at 3:28 am GMTWithin a few years, interest on the national debt will be the second largest federal expenditure, i.e. even greater than defense spending -- always left unexplained is why the US, a sovereign entity with the authority to issue currency, has to borrow money to run a deficit.
Yes, what a great "credit system".
@eaheah , says: December 30, 2019 at 9:53 am GMTFractional reserve banking (unstable and exploitative) and assignment of debt to assignees/purchasers (provided the borrower has agreed to a covenant allowing this) are two separate issues. It is possible to have either one without the other. The idea that you're released from your debt if your lender dies or moves to a far off city or gets worn out trying to collect or whatever is a notion worthy of a junior high school juvenile delinquent. Also if national sovereignty means the right to welsh on debts, then no one in his right mind will lend to a sovereign nation and then they cannot get credit.
@Hiberniansilviosilver , says: December 30, 2019 at 12:41 pm GMT(of course this will have consequences too; living beyond one's means indefinitely always does eventually).
Student loan debt is massively detrimental to affordable family formation -- I also see it as immoral to burden young people in this way.
Multi-generational national indebtedness is profoundly immoral -- it's a disgrace that there is little to no recognition of this, or outrage about what is going on.
@eah edit system" that burdens millions of young adults with debt in the form of student loans, which ultimately is also money created out of nothing and loaned to them.That's much more a consequence of the prevailing American attitude towards higher education that individuals should pay for it rather than the state than it is the monetary system.
If fractional reserve banking is nothing more than "creating money out of nothing," then don't you ever ask yourself how it is that a bank could find itself in financial trouble? Why doesn't it just create some more money out of thin air and put itself back in the black?
Hibernian , says: December 30, 2019 at 12:58 pm GMT
@eah ts, although for individuals some are protected, or a repayment plan (for individuals) or a reorganization plan (for corporations.) It requires the payment of often large legal fees. It's not equivalent to walking away (although sometimes it looks like close to the same thing) or having the debt forgiven based on political pressure, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether any of the creditors are assignees who bought the paper, or not.Hibernian , says: December 30, 2019 at 1:09 pm GMTPrinting press finance just means that government, instead of private interests, defrauds the people. Edison was a great inventor but hardly a sophisticated economic and /or political thinker.
@eah out better than others. If paying $0.10 on the dollar automatically made you rich, the world would have a lot more billionaires than it does now. The rate would quickly be bid up to $0.95 on the dollar in no time flat. Also, legal fees and other collection costs (towing away or storing ships, etc.) need to be taken into account.Hibernian , says: December 30, 2019 at 1:21 pm GMTI suspect that Mr. Singer may use his political influence to get the US, and likely some other governments, to aid in the collections. That is an issue in itself. That is where the ethical issue lies. As another poster mentioned, the way he uses his money (his idea of the good of society) is also an issue.
@silviosilvereah , says: December 30, 2019 at 2:08 pm GMTThe answer to your last sentence is that the government places limits through reserve requirements. If this were not so a run on the bank could end the charade. Sometimes these runs still happen and the FDIC steps in. Unlike the government, the bank has to redeem its paper (checks and passbooks) on demand. The government has not done this for private parties since 1933, or for foreign governments since 1971. It can and does tell you to just continue circulating the paper, which creditors are required to accept, no matter how watered down it is.
@Hibernian it has full authority to do, instead of selling debt , taxpayers, including future generations of taxpayers, are nor burdened with interest payments, nor with repayment of principal .eah , says: December 30, 2019 at 2:21 pm GMTEdison was a great inventor but hardly a sophisticated economic and /or political thinker.
Sure bud, whatever you say -- the essential question here is, was he correct in his statement re debt issuance and who benefits from it, also its disadvantages, vs dollar issuance? -- the answer is yes, he clearly was: it makes no sense for a government to sell debt when it can just spend money .
@silviosilver uch more a consequence of the prevailing American attitude towards higher education that individuals should pay for it rather than the state than it is the monetary system.Hibernian , says: December 30, 2019 at 5:39 pm GMTSure, right -- BOOM!, suddenly the "the prevailing American attitude towards higher education", also young people, just changed, and within a generation or so, it was decided to exploit the hell out of them and burden them with huge amounts of debt .
"LOL" -- you are naive.
Regardless of the etiology, student debt is immoral and something must be done about it.
Ginger Bread Man , says: December 30, 2019 at 7:56 pm GMTBankruptcy law, like other laws, limits the discretion of judges. Sure, in practice, this is aspirational. As is the notion that some judges deviations from the law are motivated by fairness.
"LOL" -- yeah, "what's the difference?" -- at least in the case of a government spending money into existence, which it has full authority to do, instead of selling debt, taxpayers, including future generations of taxpayers, are nor burdened with interest payments, nor with repayment of principal.
A super iconoclast vis a vis businessmen, especially if they're Jewish, but a true believer that Government is the same thing as The People, or at least represents them perfectly or almost perfectly.
it makes no sense for a government to sell debt when it can just spend money.
And it makes no sense to work, save, be frugal, borrow only as necessary, and pay back what you borrow, when you can write bad checks oh wait Government is Divinely Anointed! It is of the People, by the People, and for the People!
Which one of us is being obtuse? I'll leave it as an exercise for the student.
So, can anyone tell my why Jewish people would want to fund homosexual causes? What benefit does it give them? I'm just beginning to understand the mass migration thing, but still neither of these seem explicitly Jewish. Doesn't the Torah ban homosexuality? Just wondering
Barb Weir , says: December 31, 2019 at 1:52 am GMT
@HammerJack flak," said Standiford.Barb Weir , says: December 31, 2019 at 1:58 am GMTCarnegie was born in 1836 in Dunfermline, Fife. His father was a handloom weaver and an active Chartist who marched for the rights of the working man. So when Andrew went to sleep every night knowing he had starved, beaten and killed his factory workers, he spent his $$$$ trying to assuage his conscience.
Andrew is not a hero, hero's don't kill their employees by starvation and shooting!Despicable man, trying to pave his way to Heaven.
Similar to Mr. Bloomberg who states that his path to heaven is assured by his good works.
Gag me with a Gomulka please.
@Anon " said Standiford.Ginger bread man , says: December 31, 2019 at 2:57 am GMTCarnegie was born in 1836 in Dunfermline, Fife. His father was a handloom weaver and an active Chartist who marched for the rights of the working man. So when Andrew went to sleep every night knowing he had starved, beaten and killed his factory workers, he spent his $$$$ trying to assuage his conscience.
Andrew is not a hero, hero's don't kill their employees by starvation and shooting!Despicable man, trying to pave his way to Heaven.
Similar to Mr. Bloomberg who states that his path to heaven is assured by his good works.
Gag me with a Gomulka please.
@geokat62geokat62 , says: December 31, 2019 at 4:44 am GMTInteresting, where does it mention homosexuality?
@Ginger bread maneah , says: December 31, 2019 at 6:43 pm GMTThis was the Frankfurt School's great insight. The best way to undermine a sense of nationalism is to divide the people through the promotion of identity politics, including LGBTQ.
Some of what Paul Singer does with his money: create front organizations to recruit Christians in the effort to make the Middle East safe for Israel, and the world safe for Jews:
This guy is competing for world's top butt goy. Unfortunately there is a lot of competition. The author, Robert Nicholson, is President of Philos Project, a pro-Zionist "Christian" organization that is funded by Paul Singer.
The above tweet refers to this piece in the NY Post by Robert Nicholson, director of the 'Philos Project':
American Christians should lead the fight against anti-Semitism
An interesting blog post from a few years ago (2015) re the sudden appearance of the 'Philos Project' -- even today it is difficult to find info (eg financial) on this organization:
The Jewish Billionaire Behind A New Christian Anti-Iran Group
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Jan 01, 2020 | crookedtimber.org
likbez 12.31.19 at 2:25 pm 15
Tim 12.31.19 at 3:46 am @3"If this succeeds, we'll be well on the path to dictatorship." This seems predicated on the idea that 'whites' will only be able to hold onto power by Dictatorship. Population trends suggest whites will still be the largest group [just under half] in 2055. A considerable group given their, to borrow the phrase, 'privilege'. Add conservative Asian and even Catholic Latino voters, is it that difficult to envisage a scenario where Republicans sometimes achieve power without Dictatorship? They are already benefiting from the radical left helping drive traditional working class white voters to the right [helped by Republican/Fox etc hyperbole].
Radical left is either idiots, or stooges of intelligence agencies and always has been.
IMHO the idea that " whites" are or will be the force behind the move to the dictatorship is completely naïve. Dictatorship is needed for financial oligarchy and it is the most plausible path of development due to another factor -- the collapse of neoliberal ideology and complete discrediting of neoliberal elite. At least in the USA.
Russiagate should be viewed as an attempt to stage a color revolution and remove the President by the USA intelligence agencies (in close cooperation with the "Five eyes") -- a prolog to the establishing of the dictatorship by financial oligarchy
I would view Russiagate is a kind of Beer Hall Putsch with intelligence agencies instead of national-socialist party. A couple of conspirators might be jailed after Durham investigation is finished (Hitler was jailed after the putsch), but the danger that CIA will seize the political power remains. After all KGB was in this role in the USSR for along time. Is the USA that different? I don't think so. There is no countervailing force: the number of people with security clearance in the USA exceed five million. Those five million and not "whites" like some completely naïve people propose is the critical mass needed for the dictatorship.
https://news.yahoo.com/durham-surprises-even-allies-statement-202907008.htmlThe potential explosiveness of Durham's mission was further underscored by the disclosure that he was examining the role of John O. Brennan, the former CIA director, in how the intelligence community assessed Russia's 2016 election interference.
BTW "whites" are not a homogeneous group. There is especially abhorrent and dangerous neoliberal strata of "whites" including members of financial oligarchy, the "professional class" and "academia" (economics department are completely infected.) as well as MIC prostitutes in MSM.
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Dec 29, 2019 | www.truthdig.com
A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the New York Times and Politico published major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins -- but they foreshadow a massive escalation of anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.
Throughout 2019, corporate media routinely asserted that the Sanders campaign had little chance of winning the nomination. As is so often the case, journalists were echoing each other more than paying attention to grassroots realities. But now, polling numbers and other indicators on the ground are finally sparking very different headlines from the media establishment.
From the Times : " Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat ." From Politico : " Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination ."
Those stories, and others likely to follow in copycat news outlets, will heighten the energies of Sanders supporters and draw in many wavering voters. But the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign's chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority.
For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks.
Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage -- synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party -- will range from condescending to savage.
When the Bernie campaign wasn't being ignored by corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain't seen nothing yet.
With so much at stake -- including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party -- no holds will be barred. For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it'll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.
While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that a Sanders presidency is a real possibility . The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets that distort options and encourage passivity.
Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it is done."
From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.
Jan Goslinga 38 minutes ago ,
Maxwell Jan Goslinga 15 minutes ago ,Elections aren't real. Democrats will nominate Joe Biden to lose the election. Trump will remain as fascist strongman and the dems will continue to blame his neoconservative policies on his white trash constituency.
Bernie serves a few important functions.
1. he keeps the radicals from leaving the plantation and going 3rd party.
2. his promotion of progressive policies will make Biden less popular and help him lose to Trump
3. Bernie and his "socialism" can then be blamed for losing the election to TrumpMensch59 Maxwell 8 minutes ago edited ,Unfortunately this comment will be buried in this monstrosity of a thread- now at over 300 comments with only about a third of them having a much relevance.
You might consider re-posting in reply to one of the foremost comments. Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.
I've often wondered how it is people could believe the elections could have any positive and lasting impact on their lives if they have been through a couple of cycles. Do they not also wonder how it is that these election (marketing) campaigns now stretch out for well over a year nowadays demanding everyone's political attention, energy and resources. To say it is a colossal waste does not quite capture the enormity of the mind job being to people.
Mensch59 Jan Goslinga 21 minutes ago ,
Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. You "realists" who are true believers that you have the Truth and have a calling to preach the Truth absolutely must stand against the unwashed masses who claim that your "reality" isn't even intersubjectively verifiable, much less dialectical & material [eta & historical ].
I quite enjoyed what SteelPirate/LaborSolidarity had to say about you attempting to gain a vanguard following by trolling lib-prog sites.
newestbeginning 2 hours ago ,
Elections aren't real.Never pay attention to anyone who claims what's "real" and what isn't. Politics certainly doesn't exist in the realm of an objective, concrete, physical, naturalistic, materialistic reality which is shared by a consensus of rational observers. At best, politics deals with intersubjectively verifiable social phenomena. Thus, politics is mostly idealistic in the belief that each mind generates its own reality.
This realization is the topic of intersubjective verifiability, as recounted, for example, by Max Born (1949, 1965) Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance , who points out that all knowledge, including natural or social science, is also subjective. p. 162: "Thus it dawned upon me that fundamentally everything is subjective, everything without exception. That was a shock."V4V 2 hours ago edited ,Meanwhile the wealth of the world's top 500 grew 25% in 2019...
PGGreen V4V 2 hours ago edited ,Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders's Chances of Success- "...the chances he can be elected are pretty small." (Waiting with bated breath for copious downvotes by those who hate the truth and hate reality).
https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FEpXJvWSa4FQ%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEpXJvWSa4FQ&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FEpXJvWSa4FQ%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube
V4V PGGreen an hour ago ,Most of who support Sanders know that his presidency will involve an uphill battle. Chomsky is being realistic.
But there really is no better option for meaningful change working within the political system than supporting Sanders. it is also important to note that "Our Revolution" has energized many young activists, encouraging them to continue the fight. This goes beyond politics to social and economic issues. If Sanders leaves us with a movement, this may turn out to be more important than the presidency in the long run.
Keep working for effective moral and economic justice and democracy!
PGGreen V4V 21 minutes ago edited ,Well, I have said this several times, it's not the microscopic left that you need to convince, it's the majority of self-identifying Democrats not supporting Sanders that you need to convince. I am repelled by the Democratic Party, but there are millions who identify as Democrats and many are proud of it. You need to convince them, not us.
V4V PGGreen 6 minutes ago ,Yes, although I don't think that those who support a Leftist agenda--whether you actually call them Leftists or not--are quite so microscopic a group as you imply. But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect, or that it will be difficult for him to be elected president. We already know; we simply consider him the best option within this context of voting.
Have you ever thought of turning your approach to systemic commentary (which is valid and interesting, BTW, I'm not discounting it) around and saying what candidates you support-- in this context being discussed of voting-- instead of which ones you don't? And then explaining why such support would be effective?
I would say that what is wrong with the world is more a fault of the economic and political system than of Sanders alone--who not only plays small part in causing what is wrong, but a significant part in trying to correct it. Yes, he works within the system. That is a given. It may be, as Chris Hedges thinks, that there is no hope working within the system. But Noam Chomsky's approach also bears serious consideration that even Hedges doesn't discount. Voting will only be a small part of what brings about change, but it may make some slight difference--if you can stomach it. And it only takes a small amount of time.
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
I don't see much of an argument that Sanders will be no better as president than Trump (and if you think so, I'd like to hear you argue it). I suspect you find the compromise unpalatable. I can understand that. I, too, draw the line at a certain point. I couldn't vote for HRC.
Yes, Sanders isn't perfect. Chomsky also said another important thing: "We're all compromised." Everyone who is a citizen of the US is compromised, and bears some measure of responsibility for the military interventions undertaken by our government. Perhaps we should renounce our citizenship, refuse to pay taxes, etc. But most of us don't -- not even those of us committed to activist work in other ways -- significant ways -- to make things better.
So what are those ways, for you?
Mensch59 PGGreen 16 minutes ago ,But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect
-for me it isn' that he's not perfect, it's that I think he sucks
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
-funny, that's a favorite line of Democrats
I get that, but it doesn't negate that Sanders's chances are next to nil.
Your suggestion of me signaling whom I support would fall on deaf ears around here. I have said this many times- I will probably for the Green Party candidate or the Socialist Equality Party candidate. If only a Democrat and Republican appear on the ballot then I would refuse to vote even if I had to pay a fine. I am not in the habit of telling anyone whom to vote for unless asked.
Before a 3rd can succeed, the fantasy that the fix can come through the Democrats needs to be destroyed. Not to worry, in due time it will be obvious.
Patrick_Walker V4V 2 hours ago edited ,My guess/bet is that V4V believes that the truth "We're all compromised" doesn't apply to him.
He sees himself as a truth-knower and a truth-teller.
He won't commit to logical argumentation.
He'll preach the truth to you.V4V Patrick_Walker an hour ago edited ,I saw this video long ago--and agreed with it. But though Sanders' chances are small, they're still vastly larger than the NONEXISTENT chances of success of the purist, "Born to Lose" left. Why not just admit that you've totally given up and simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
acme V4V an hour ago ,simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
-straw man
That isn't what I do because I couldn't care less whom Democrats support and vote for. Typically, I post some unpleasant truth about Sanders, like his lackluster polling numbers or his support for neoliberal warmongers and sit back and watch the ad hominems and downvotes roll in. I am not normally on the attack, I am usually on the receiving end.
I admit that I see this forum as a form of entertainment. I admit I have zero expectation that someone to my liking will be elected president and that the system is going to change anytime soon. Do I believe it possible? Yes, I believe it is possible, I just don't believe it possible using the corrupt, Democratic Party as a vehicle and that's where we differ.
And that the crux of our issue- you believe the Democratic Party can be used a vehicle to convert the CIA/Wall Street/War Inc. Democrats into the peoples' party, and I do not. If the needed changes are ever to arrive, it will be in spite of the Democrats not because of them. I hope you stick around because in due time I'll be telling you, "Told ya so."
V4V acme an hour ago edited ,The problem with your position is that, unlike Sanders, you don't seem to understand that a third candidate party candidate hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of being president unless if s/he somehow gets more electoral votes that both the major parties combined. If not, it goes to the house, and in the current partisan atmosphere, would be decided for the candidate of the House majority.
The major parties have a death-grip on the presidency while the electoral college exists.Zsuzsi Kruska 4 hours ago edited ,You don't seem to understand that Sanders has a snowball's chance in hell of being the Democratic Party candidate for many reasons including the DNC arguing in court it is a private corporation and can legally rig primary and the trusty superdelegates for Biden.
What I propose is a movement outside the Democratic Party in inside it. I believe any attempt to reform the Democratic Party is doomed to fail. All this whistling in the dark over Sanders is a distraction and a kicking the can down the road to the time you Democrats finally realize it isn't going to work. You obviously didn't learn it in 2016, and I would be surprised if you learn it once Sanders tanks and begins campaigning for Biden just like he did Clinton. I will promise this, I'll say, "I told ya so" in a matter of months. That's okay, play it again, Sam.
People believe they need others to tell them what to do and give them the illusion somebody cares about them and has their best interests at heart. That's an archetype in the brain that goes back to our baby/childhood when we were dependent on our caregivers for sustenance, comfort and life itself.That's where the original concept of needing "leaders" comes from. But, what happens is psyco/sociopaths see this weakness in humanity and force their way to the top, to herd and exploit the gullible sheeple for their own agendas and selfish interests. No matter who rises to the top, she/he got their through the same system that's been going on since tribes had their chief; chief's lieutenant and witch doctor/shaman. Those three keep the tribe in line with their own desires. Chief through brute force, his lieutenant through information and witch doctor through religion and "spiritual" services; and all three require tribute and fees from the rest of the tribe. So, you will see, regardless of who the next POTUS will be, that same structure, although more complex today, will repeat itself. New boss/old boss, same ol' same ol'. All power has to be returned to the people at the local level before Wash. starts WWIII. But, if that happens, at least we won't have to worry about global warming with a nuclear winter after the bombs drop.
Nir Haramati 3 days ago edited ,As usual, I find your analysis and commentary honest and accurate. However, I do take exception to your pulling out these canards:
"Trump's contempt of Congress and attempt to get Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in exchange for almost $400 million in U.S. military aid and allowing Zelensky to visit the White House are impeachable offenses"Trump has certain executive privileges and him being guilty of contempt of Congress should be up to the Supreme Court to decide. Jonathan Turley in his testimony made that quite clear. Military aid was never mentioned in the phone call. Zelensky was unaware aid would be withheld. So if Trump were using the money as a means to induce Zelensky to do those favors, it was a totally botched one. To quote Dr. Strangelove, "The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret!"
Kaptain Amerika 3 days ago edited ,
New avenues for accountability and oversight became possible in Washington, D.C., in 2019, following the election of a new Democratic Party majority in the House (and the most diverse Congress ever) in the 2018 midterms. As a result, Democrats took hold of the subpoena power that rests in the House of Representatives, along with the power to set the agenda across congressional committees. As a result, 2019 has been full of important moments for congressional oversight of both the Trump administration and private business. Here are five of the most important moments in congressional oversight in 2019.1. Betsy DeVos, Are You "Too Corrupt" or "Too Incompetent"? ...
2. Big Bank CEOs Are Stumped by Simple Budgets ...
3. Wells Fargo Announces Plan to Divest From Private Prisons in Congressional Testimony ...
4. Rep. Ilhan Omar vs. Elliott Abrams ...
5. Voting to Impeach the President ...Congressional Oversight Claimed Important Victories in 2019. Here Are the Top 5
The only people who lie and obfuscate facts as much as Trump and his GOP cult are neo progressive demagogues and propaganda buffs like Chris 'regime-change-in-America' Hedges.
Dr Hacksaw Kaptain Amerika 3 days ago edited ,Absolutely bush should have been impeached, convicted, removed and executed for war crimes and mass murder.
But because he wasn't doesn't mean that our orange Fuhrer shouldn't be.
He is the most dangerous authoritarian propagandist and threat to this country since Hitler.rosemariejackowski Dr Hacksaw 3 days ago ,"[Trump] is the most dangerous authoritarian propagandist and threat to this country since Hitler."
Correction, Kaptain: Since Obama.
Kaptain Amerika Dr Hacksaw 3 days ago ,THE MOST DANGEROUS IN HISTORY....
https://countercurrents.org...Ron Ruggieri Dr Hacksaw 3 days ago ,NObama was a horrible POTUS for the 99% and is THE reason why we have trump, but he didn't poison every aspect of the government and everything else like your orange Fuhrer is doing, which is the exact same tactic that Hitler used to create Nazi Germany.
VallejoD 3 days ago ,The generic Left is ignoring this aspect of the Trump impeachment circus . The whole farce IS political. Now Senator Lisa Murkowski wants her Republican Party to rise above politics ( and do the wrong thing ? ). In the past three years when did the Democrat Party ever rise above politics ? Politics USA is always CLASS politics, always IMPERIALIST , MILITARIST politics . All the " liberal " Democrats have been slobbering over the UN-ELECTED shadow government of the United States , the National Security Police State , slobbering over FBI, CIA bureaucrats , uniformed officials of the Pentagon War Crimes Machine . Join them ?
This Senator Lisa Murkowski -no surprise - is in good standing with the Israel Lobby collectively determined to nullify the 2016 presidential election . NEWS clip :
[ "There are about 6 million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it's quite small, but in terms of influence its quite big," Farage said. Farage seemed to question why Israel was not facing election-meddling accusations, saying Israeli groups "have a voice within American politics" but "I don't think anybody is suggesting that the Israeli government tried to affect the result of the American elections."]
Did not the Kafkaesque Trump impeachment hearings look and sound like Old Yiddish Theater soap opera ? How many working class Christian Americans have heartfelt moral and cultural ties to the Ukraine of all places, now celebrating its first Jewish friend of Zionist Apartheid Israel president ? Who in the USA authorized this character to wage a proxy war against post-communist Russia ? WE THE PEOPLE ?
Guess WHO is promoting the HATE RUSSIA, New McCarthyism ?$748 billion in 2020 for the military death machine equals $23 MILLION A SECOND.
How many schools or hospitals could have been built, how many roads or bridges repaired, how many students educated with the money the MIC has squandered in the few seconds it has taken me to write this?
We are destroying our people from the inside out. This is treason.
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Dec 29, 2019 | www.truthdig.com
A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the New York Times and Politico published major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins -- but they foreshadow a massive escalation of anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.
Throughout 2019, corporate media routinely asserted that the Sanders campaign had little chance of winning the nomination. As is so often the case, journalists were echoing each other more than paying attention to grassroots realities. But now, polling numbers and other indicators on the ground are finally sparking very different headlines from the media establishment.
From the Times : " Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat ." From Politico : " Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination ."
Those stories, and others likely to follow in copycat news outlets, will heighten the energies of Sanders supporters and draw in many wavering voters. But the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign's chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority.
For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks.
Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage -- synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party -- will range from condescending to savage.
When the Bernie campaign wasn't being ignored by corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain't seen nothing yet.
With so much at stake -- including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party -- no holds will be barred. For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it'll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.
While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that a Sanders presidency is a real possibility . The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets that distort options and encourage passivity.
Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it is done."
From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.
Jan Goslinga 38 minutes ago ,
Maxwell Jan Goslinga 15 minutes ago ,Elections aren't real. Democrats will nominate Joe Biden to lose the election. Trump will remain as fascist strongman and the dems will continue to blame his neoconservative policies on his white trash constituency.
Bernie serves a few important functions.
1. he keeps the radicals from leaving the plantation and going 3rd party.
2. his promotion of progressive policies will make Biden less popular and help him lose to Trump
3. Bernie and his "socialism" can then be blamed for losing the election to TrumpMensch59 Maxwell 8 minutes ago edited ,Unfortunately this comment will be buried in this monstrosity of a thread- now at over 300 comments with only about a third of them having a much relevance.
You might consider re-posting in reply to one of the foremost comments. Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.
I've often wondered how it is people could believe the elections could have any positive and lasting impact on their lives if they have been through a couple of cycles. Do they not also wonder how it is that these election (marketing) campaigns now stretch out for well over a year nowadays demanding everyone's political attention, energy and resources. To say it is a colossal waste does not quite capture the enormity of the mind job being to people.
Mensch59 Jan Goslinga 21 minutes ago ,
Your simple realism will certainly not be well received during the campaign hallucinations.Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. You "realists" who are true believers that you have the Truth and have a calling to preach the Truth absolutely must stand against the unwashed masses who claim that your "reality" isn't even intersubjectively verifiable, much less dialectical & material [eta & historical ].
I quite enjoyed what SteelPirate/LaborSolidarity had to say about you attempting to gain a vanguard following by trolling lib-prog sites.
newestbeginning 2 hours ago ,
Elections aren't real.Never pay attention to anyone who claims what's "real" and what isn't. Politics certainly doesn't exist in the realm of an objective, concrete, physical, naturalistic, materialistic reality which is shared by a consensus of rational observers. At best, politics deals with intersubjectively verifiable social phenomena. Thus, politics is mostly idealistic in the belief that each mind generates its own reality.
This realization is the topic of intersubjective verifiability, as recounted, for example, by Max Born (1949, 1965) Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance , who points out that all knowledge, including natural or social science, is also subjective. p. 162: "Thus it dawned upon me that fundamentally everything is subjective, everything without exception. That was a shock."V4V 2 hours ago edited ,Meanwhile the wealth of the world's top 500 grew 25% in 2019...
PGGreen V4V 2 hours ago edited ,Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders's Chances of Success- "...the chances he can be elected are pretty small." (Waiting with bated breath for copious downvotes by those who hate the truth and hate reality).
https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FEpXJvWSa4FQ%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEpXJvWSa4FQ&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FEpXJvWSa4FQ%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube
V4V PGGreen an hour ago ,Most of who support Sanders know that his presidency will involve an uphill battle. Chomsky is being realistic.
But there really is no better option for meaningful change working within the political system than supporting Sanders. it is also important to note that "Our Revolution" has energized many young activists, encouraging them to continue the fight. This goes beyond politics to social and economic issues. If Sanders leaves us with a movement, this may turn out to be more important than the presidency in the long run.
Keep working for effective moral and economic justice and democracy!
PGGreen V4V 21 minutes ago edited ,Well, I have said this several times, it's not the microscopic left that you need to convince, it's the majority of self-identifying Democrats not supporting Sanders that you need to convince. I am repelled by the Democratic Party, but there are millions who identify as Democrats and many are proud of it. You need to convince them, not us.
V4V PGGreen 6 minutes ago ,Yes, although I don't think that those who support a Leftist agenda--whether you actually call them Leftists or not--are quite so microscopic a group as you imply. But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect, or that it will be difficult for him to be elected president. We already know; we simply consider him the best option within this context of voting.
Have you ever thought of turning your approach to systemic commentary (which is valid and interesting, BTW, I'm not discounting it) around and saying what candidates you support-- in this context being discussed of voting-- instead of which ones you don't? And then explaining why such support would be effective?
I would say that what is wrong with the world is more a fault of the economic and political system than of Sanders alone--who not only plays small part in causing what is wrong, but a significant part in trying to correct it. Yes, he works within the system. That is a given. It may be, as Chris Hedges thinks, that there is no hope working within the system. But Noam Chomsky's approach also bears serious consideration that even Hedges doesn't discount. Voting will only be a small part of what brings about change, but it may make some slight difference--if you can stomach it. And it only takes a small amount of time.
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
I don't see much of an argument that Sanders will be no better as president than Trump (and if you think so, I'd like to hear you argue it). I suspect you find the compromise unpalatable. I can understand that. I, too, draw the line at a certain point. I couldn't vote for HRC.
Yes, Sanders isn't perfect. Chomsky also said another important thing: "We're all compromised." Everyone who is a citizen of the US is compromised, and bears some measure of responsibility for the military interventions undertaken by our government. Perhaps we should renounce our citizenship, refuse to pay taxes, etc. But most of us don't -- not even those of us committed to activist work in other ways -- significant ways -- to make things better.
So what are those ways, for you?
Mensch59 PGGreen 16 minutes ago ,But you don't need to convince me or most others here (probably) that Sanders isn't perfect
-for me it isn' that he's not perfect, it's that I think he sucks
"In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
-funny, that's a favorite line of Democrats
I get that, but it doesn't negate that Sanders's chances are next to nil.
Your suggestion of me signaling whom I support would fall on deaf ears around here. I have said this many times- I will probably for the Green Party candidate or the Socialist Equality Party candidate. If only a Democrat and Republican appear on the ballot then I would refuse to vote even if I had to pay a fine. I am not in the habit of telling anyone whom to vote for unless asked.
Before a 3rd can succeed, the fantasy that the fix can come through the Democrats needs to be destroyed. Not to worry, in due time it will be obvious.
Patrick_Walker V4V 2 hours ago edited ,My guess/bet is that V4V believes that the truth "We're all compromised" doesn't apply to him.
He sees himself as a truth-knower and a truth-teller.
He won't commit to logical argumentation.
He'll preach the truth to you.V4V Patrick_Walker an hour ago edited ,I saw this video long ago--and agreed with it. But though Sanders' chances are small, they're still vastly larger than the NONEXISTENT chances of success of the purist, "Born to Lose" left. Why not just admit that you've totally given up and simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
acme V4V an hour ago ,simply like to spent your time bitching and criticizing those of us with some (albeit small) hope?
-straw man
That isn't what I do because I couldn't care less whom Democrats support and vote for. Typically, I post some unpleasant truth about Sanders, like his lackluster polling numbers or his support for neoliberal warmongers and sit back and watch the ad hominems and downvotes roll in. I am not normally on the attack, I am usually on the receiving end.
I admit that I see this forum as a form of entertainment. I admit I have zero expectation that someone to my liking will be elected president and that the system is going to change anytime soon. Do I believe it possible? Yes, I believe it is possible, I just don't believe it possible using the corrupt, Democratic Party as a vehicle and that's where we differ.
And that the crux of our issue- you believe the Democratic Party can be used a vehicle to convert the CIA/Wall Street/War Inc. Democrats into the peoples' party, and I do not. If the needed changes are ever to arrive, it will be in spite of the Democrats not because of them. I hope you stick around because in due time I'll be telling you, "Told ya so."
V4V acme an hour ago edited ,The problem with your position is that, unlike Sanders, you don't seem to understand that a third candidate party candidate hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of being president unless if s/he somehow gets more electoral votes that both the major parties combined. If not, it goes to the house, and in the current partisan atmosphere, would be decided for the candidate of the House majority.
The major parties have a death-grip on the presidency while the electoral college exists.Zsuzsi Kruska 4 hours ago edited ,You don't seem to understand that Sanders has a snowball's chance in hell of being the Democratic Party candidate for many reasons including the DNC arguing in court it is a private corporation and can legally rig primary and the trusty superdelegates for Biden.
What I propose is a movement outside the Democratic Party in inside it. I believe any attempt to reform the Democratic Party is doomed to fail. All this whistling in the dark over Sanders is a distraction and a kicking the can down the road to the time you Democrats finally realize it isn't going to work. You obviously didn't learn it in 2016, and I would be surprised if you learn it once Sanders tanks and begins campaigning for Biden just like he did Clinton. I will promise this, I'll say, "I told ya so" in a matter of months. That's okay, play it again, Sam.
People believe they need others to tell them what to do and give them the illusion somebody cares about them and has their best interests at heart. That's an archetype in the brain that goes back to our baby/childhood when we were dependent on our caregivers for sustenance, comfort and life itself.That's where the original concept of needing "leaders" comes from. But, what happens is psyco/sociopaths see this weakness in humanity and force their way to the top, to herd and exploit the gullible sheeple for their own agendas and selfish interests. No matter who rises to the top, she/he got their through the same system that's been going on since tribes had their chief; chief's lieutenant and witch doctor/shaman. Those three keep the tribe in line with their own desires. Chief through brute force, his lieutenant through information and witch doctor through religion and "spiritual" services; and all three require tribute and fees from the rest of the tribe. So, you will see, regardless of who the next POTUS will be, that same structure, although more complex today, will repeat itself. New boss/old boss, same ol' same ol'. All power has to be returned to the people at the local level before Wash. starts WWIII. But, if that happens, at least we won't have to worry about global warming with a nuclear winter after the bombs drop.
Nir Haramati 3 days ago edited ,As usual, I find your analysis and commentary honest and accurate. However, I do take exception to your pulling out these canards:
"Trump's contempt of Congress and attempt to get Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in exchange for almost $400 million in U.S. military aid and allowing Zelensky to visit the White House are impeachable offenses"Trump has certain executive privileges and him being guilty of contempt of Congress should be up to the Supreme Court to decide. Jonathan Turley in his testimony made that quite clear. Military aid was never mentioned in the phone call. Zelensky was unaware aid would be withheld. So if Trump were using the money as a means to induce Zelensky to do those favors, it was a totally botched one. To quote Dr. Strangelove, "The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret!"
Kaptain Amerika 3 days ago edited ,
New avenues for accountability and oversight became possible in Washington, D.C., in 2019, following the election of a new Democratic Party majority in the House (and the most diverse Congress ever) in the 2018 midterms. As a result, Democrats took hold of the subpoena power that rests in the House of Representatives, along with the power to set the agenda across congressional committees. As a result, 2019 has been full of important moments for congressional oversight of both the Trump administration and private business. Here are five of the most important moments in congressional oversight in 2019.1. Betsy DeVos, Are You "Too Corrupt" or "Too Incompetent"? ...
2. Big Bank CEOs Are Stumped by Simple Budgets ...
3. Wells Fargo Announces Plan to Divest From Private Prisons in Congressional Testimony ...
4. Rep. Ilhan Omar vs. Elliott Abrams ...
5. Voting to Impeach the President ...Congressional Oversight Claimed Important Victories in 2019. Here Are the Top 5
The only people who lie and obfuscate facts as much as Trump and his GOP cult are neo progressive demagogues and propaganda buffs like Chris 'regime-change-in-America' Hedges.
Dr Hacksaw Kaptain Amerika 3 days ago edited ,Absolutely bush should have been impeached, convicted, removed and executed for war crimes and mass murder.
But because he wasn't doesn't mean that our orange Fuhrer shouldn't be.
He is the most dangerous authoritarian propagandist and threat to this country since Hitler.rosemariejackowski Dr Hacksaw 3 days ago ,"[Trump] is the most dangerous authoritarian propagandist and threat to this country since Hitler."
Correction, Kaptain: Since Obama.
Kaptain Amerika Dr Hacksaw 3 days ago ,THE MOST DANGEROUS IN HISTORY....
https://countercurrents.org...Ron Ruggieri Dr Hacksaw 3 days ago ,NObama was a horrible POTUS for the 99% and is THE reason why we have trump, but he didn't poison every aspect of the government and everything else like your orange Fuhrer is doing, which is the exact same tactic that Hitler used to create Nazi Germany.
VallejoD 3 days ago ,The generic Left is ignoring this aspect of the Trump impeachment circus . The whole farce IS political. Now Senator Lisa Murkowski wants her Republican Party to rise above politics ( and do the wrong thing ? ). In the past three years when did the Democrat Party ever rise above politics ? Politics USA is always CLASS politics, always IMPERIALIST , MILITARIST politics . All the " liberal " Democrats have been slobbering over the UN-ELECTED shadow government of the United States , the National Security Police State , slobbering over FBI, CIA bureaucrats , uniformed officials of the Pentagon War Crimes Machine . Join them ?
This Senator Lisa Murkowski -no surprise - is in good standing with the Israel Lobby collectively determined to nullify the 2016 presidential election . NEWS clip :
[ "There are about 6 million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it's quite small, but in terms of influence its quite big," Farage said. Farage seemed to question why Israel was not facing election-meddling accusations, saying Israeli groups "have a voice within American politics" but "I don't think anybody is suggesting that the Israeli government tried to affect the result of the American elections."]
Did not the Kafkaesque Trump impeachment hearings look and sound like Old Yiddish Theater soap opera ? How many working class Christian Americans have heartfelt moral and cultural ties to the Ukraine of all places, now celebrating its first Jewish friend of Zionist Apartheid Israel president ? Who in the USA authorized this character to wage a proxy war against post-communist Russia ? WE THE PEOPLE ?
Guess WHO is promoting the HATE RUSSIA, New McCarthyism ?$748 billion in 2020 for the military death machine equals $23 MILLION A SECOND.
How many schools or hospitals could have been built, how many roads or bridges repaired, how many students educated with the money the MIC has squandered in the few seconds it has taken me to write this?
We are destroying our people from the inside out. This is treason.
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