Дональд Джон Трамп
You know how funny it is to see a common word transliterated into a foreign tongue, yes? For instance, until quite recently, Malcolm in Russian became Мэлколм, with the a becoming an e and with both l’s pronounced. It also often, more accurately, became Мэлком, with the second l omitted. You see, Russians generally cannot hear the difference between a short English a and a short English e. To the average Russian, “man” and “men” sound exactly the same. Ditto with “pan” and “pen,” and “jam” and “gem.” That is because the two sounds in Russian are interchangeable. So my Russian video editions of Caligula proudly announce the name of the star as Мэлком МакДауэлл. When I hear Мэлком, I think “Milk ’em? Milk what?”
Similarly, we have the word “Trump.”
That particular English u sounds like uh, and appears in such words as bus or cup;
it is the same as the Sanskrit अ.
Many languages have no equivalent.
To the best of my knowledge, you will never hear that sound in Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Navajo, or Latin, and so I assume it is a rare sound.
How to render it into Russian?
The most sensible way, of course, would be “Трумп,” pronounced Troomp, with the vowel sounding like the oo in “noodle.”
Russian printers, though, don’t think this through, and so they give their readers Трамп, pronounced Trahmp,
but which, transliterated back into English, becomes Tramp.
That, it seems to me, is appropriate.
I’m beginning to get curious about this guy named Трамп.
He was on cordial terms with Franco Rossellini.
That means nothing to you, but it means a great deal to me.
You see, I am working on a book dealing with Franco Rossellini, so of course this interests me.
Yet I know that the cordiality was just a passing “Hello” now and then,
and maybe a few formal pleasantries around the table,
which was the inevitable result of their both patronizing Studio 54 and knowing Doris Duke and so forth.
Трамп also bought out Bob Guccione’s unfinished Atlantic City casino.
Interesting, yes, and that much caught my interest years ago,
simply because Bob Guccione back in 1976 decided that he would utterly ruin Franco Rossellini’s life, just because he could.
So that interests me, too.
Трамп’s ideas, of course, hold no interest for me.
It is hard not to wonder, though, where his ideas came from.
Some surely came from his dad, Fred Trump, a racist who seemed to be in the KKK.
(See “Warren Criticizes ‘Class’ Parades,” The New York Times vol. 76 no. 25,330, Wednesday, 1 June 1927, p. 16.
It’s not proof. It’s not even good evidence, not by a long shot. It does make you wonder, though.
Whatever the case, Fred definitely had mob connections:
“Trump and the Mob.”)
As for Donald himself, he was a hedonic partier, child trafficker, sex trafficker,
self-admitted sex predator,
self-admitted pedophile, and cocaine-snorter.
He eloquently described his life in the 1970’s and 1980’s:
“You had drugs, women and booze all over the fuckin’ place.
If I hadn’t got married, who knows what would have happened?... I don’t think anybody had more sex than I did. Sex was all over the fucking place.”
As for his nights at Studio 54:
“I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed, on a bench in the middle of the room.
There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy.”
He was involved with
endless business relations with the most unsavory types,
he was an irresponsible and incompetent businessman who continually went bankrupt
and who continually hired low-wage immigrants who were in the US illegally — and he was a con artist, to boot.
His cons couldn’t possibly have been his own ideas.
He never had enough of a brain to invent a con.
There are those who dismiss out of hand any claim that Трамп and his family and associates are con artists.
On the 9th of June 2016 Steve Reilly published an amusing little article in USA Today,
which he entitled,
“Hundreds Allege Donald Trump Doesn’t Pay His Bills.”
It’s a nice article. Here is an excerpt:
|
Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will “protect your job.”
But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades —
and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans... who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.
At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK,
document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work.
Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters.
Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast.
Real estate brokers who sold his properties.
And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.
Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005
for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.
That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City
and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York.
Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages....
Edward Friel, of the Philadelphia cabinetry company allegedly shortchanged for the casino work,
hired a lawyer to sue for the money, said his son, Paul Friel.
But the attorney advised him that the Trumps would drag the case out in court
and legal fees would exceed what they’d recover....
|
By the way, you do know, also, that Трамп is persistent in his claim that the Scottish people love him, yes?
You’ve Been Trumped
Yup. Isn’t he just so lovable and cuddly? How could you possibly hate a guy like that?
See also “Take Action!”
Here is a sampling of Трамп’s accomplishments:
Melissa Bartick,
“Trump’s Criminal History Should Be Front and Center,”
HuffPost, 13 September 2017.
If he were just another nightlife scumbag, or just another crooked businessman, he would not register on my radar, except in the Rossellini and Guccione contexts.
Other than that, he would interest me not in the least.
His political skills are best exemplified in a video that a friend in Italy pointed out to me:
“The
Battle of the Billionaires Takes Place at WrestleMania.”
Another grifter. Big deal. The world’s filled with ’em.
Yet he is more than that now, unfortunately.
As Трамп frequently claimed, his aim was
to bring people together,
apparently by inciting racist mob violence wherever he went.
This rancid behavior tends to upset many people, especially some of those on the left.
As for Трамп’s supporters, though, many see nothing wrong with this,
and many are entirely mystified by anti-Trump sentiment.
‘Where does this come from?’ they wonder.
Searching for answers to this puzzle, some tune into screaming right-wing chat shows
and conclude that the protesters were all stirred up by that sinister “globalist” George Soros who is so masterful at manipulating his minions.
They are convinced that the protestors are Soros’s paid servants.
Others simply wonder aloud, “Where do these liberal protestors get all their hatred? How can liberals all be filled with so much hate?
Hate, hate, hate — all the liberals do is hate.
How can anyone live like that? How can anyone be filled with so much hate?”
What many “liberals” instinctively understood was that Трамп was a con artist and a moral imbecile,
a racist, a misogynist, and a fascist
at heart, as well as a pathological liar with an explosive temper and zero knowledge of domestic or foreign affairs.
A malicious child who deliberately breaks all his toys should never be allowed anywhere near the nuclear codes and should never have authority over any military.
I was stunned recently when I met a highly educated, highly articulate professional who follows domestic and foreign news intently.
He was angry with “liberals” for smearing Трамп as a racist, a claim he found preposterous
and the worst sort of desperate straw-man fallacy.
I didn’t even know how to respond.
“Racial Views of Donald Trump,” Wikipedia.
Make of that what you will.
No, Трамп has never come straight out and said something so straightforward as “Blacks are scum,” but does he need to?
His actions and words and behaviors speak volumes about his disdain of non-whites,
and he is certainly downright hostile towards American Indians:
Evan Halper, “The Trump Agenda Has Native American Tribes Feeling under Siege,”
The Los Ángeles Times, 15 May 2018.
Oh no, it’s not just that one story.
Ruth Hopkins, “Native Tribes Could Lose Federal Recognition of Tribal Sovereignty Under Trump,” TeenVogue, 24 April 2018.
Nancy LeTourneau, “Trump’s Direct Assault on Native American Tribal Sovereignty,” Washington Monthly, 24 April 2018.
Ugly. Beyond ugly.
As many of us know, Трамп was a vocal Democrat
who supported choice and single-payer and who abhorred many Republicans and much of the Republican platform.
What happened?
It’s not hard to figure out.
First, none of his earlier statements was thought-out.
He merely spoke in sound bites as he was programmed to do.
Second, he found somebody who pays better.
Now this violent,
unstable, raging, and hopelessly unintelligent lunatic is the president of the United States of America, despite having lost the vote.
That was so odd, but so predictable.
My prediction about the 2016 election was that Sanders would win the primary, which would result in Clinton being the nominee,
and that Clinton would win the vote, which would result in Трамп being named president.
Nobody believed me. Well...?
With the Voting Rights Act disemboweled,
and with gerrymandering
and voter suppression operating at full throttle, there was really no other possible outcome.
So few people realized that.
I have not the tiniest bit of love for any of those three candidates, but we ended up with by far the worst.
(Gloria
La Riva was the best candidate, but she didn’t stand a chance because she had no corporate sponsorship,
and also because she’s American Indian and hence unrelated to high government and business officials.
Further, and probably most importantly, she’s not an egomaniac.)
To counter the solid evidence of widespread voter suppression,
the current administration wheels out Kris Kobach to make the opposite claim of millions of duplicate and otherwise illegal votes.
This claim is echoed by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent political organization whose every pronouncement should be disbelieved.
Nonetheless, people believe this claim.
Intelligent, well-educated , well-read people believe this.
What can I say?
Sherman Smith, “ACLU:
Report to Kris Kobach Shows 5 Illegal Voters out of 1.3 Million Ballots,” The Topeka Capital-Journal, 8 March 2018.
Wikipedia has more about this.
Mother Jones skewered the whole claim of voter fraud as well,
and reported on the actual results of voter ID laws, which were not pretty. Worth a read.
Upon winning the election, and prior to taking office, Трамп was already causing US diplomacy serious problems.
Politics has always been corrupt. That’s the name of the game, as we all know. Now, though, corruption has been taken to a whole new level,
as US diplomacy is being manipulated to enrich Трамп and his children,
and US diplomacy and policy are also held hostage to Трамп’s business interests.
Here is some level-headed reporting from Newsweek, 13 December 2016: Kurt Eichenwald,
“How
Donald Trump’s Business Ties Are Already Jeopardizing U.S. Interests.”
The same journalist also penned an article for the 14 September 2016 issue:
“How
the Trump Organization’s Foreign Business Ties Could Upend U.S. National Security.”
These offenses are impeachable — more than impeachable.
As Eichenwald writes, “the foreign policy of the United States of America could well be for sale.”
His prophecy was correct. Our foreign policy is for sale.
This, of course, is an impeachable offense.
Yet my prediction is that Трамп
will not be removed from office.
He’ll remain in office until 2024 or until he croaks from all that horrid junk food he’s been ingesting all his life.
Once Трамп is gone, our next administration will be even worse.
Why do I insist that Трамп will not be removed from office?
Well, allow me to introduce you to our next Supreme Court Justice, the Honorable Brett Kavanaugh,
who will be the deciding vote on all future cases, and he will decide everything in favor of corporations and the rich and powerful.
He won Трамп’s heart by arguing that a president cannot be investigated for any criminal acts.
So there.
Let’s see how we all enjoy the new rulings that will declare abortion and birth control and civil rights
not protected by the Constitution.
Let’s see how well that goes over.
As for Трамп being a moron, all we need note is
his public support of Alex Jones.
Imagine that: a president of the United States of America who believes the reporting on InfoWars.
To call this stupidity is to be too kind.
This is far worse than stupidity.
If Трамп is so vacuous,
so vapid, so brain-damaged as to believe Alex Jones,
then there is no craziness to which he would be immune.
Why do all these so-called Republicans support him?
(The Republican party is extinct. The party that currently calls itself Republican is actually anti-Republican.)
All the reasons can be boiled down to one:
They are all compromised, and if they fail to support Трамп,
the skeletons in their own closets will be paraded down Main Street for all to see.
Is Трамп the only moron in this administration?
Hardly.
Get a load of Wilbur Ross.
As you can guess, Wilbur Ross is connected with the
Russian oligarchs and Russian money laundering.
Oh fun fun fun fun fun.
That ain’t all, ’cuz he ain’t the only one in that gang who’s that mind-bogglingly dumb.
Take, for instance,
Jared Kushner, who is monumentally stupid.
So, under Трамп we’re cozying up to the Saudi royal prince,
despite Saudi Arabia’s crimes against the US.
Didn’t Трамп imply that he was anti-Muslim?
Isn’t Saudia Arabia funding ISIS? Isn’t ISIS at war with our troops?
So we’re selling billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to our enemies?
Is that technically treason, as defined by the US Constitution?
I don’t know, but it don’t make me feel none too good.
Well, I guess Трамп is only anti-Muslim when being anti-Muslim doesn’t put his investments at risk.
Трамп has
investments and/or business deals and/or planned business deals in
Saudia Arabia,
the
United Arab Emirates,
Azerbaijan,
Qatar,
Egypt, and
Turkey, among others.
Ahhhhh.
Now do you understand the Muslim ban?
People from which Muslim countries were barred from entering the US?
Hmmmmm. Which ones were they?
Huh. Let’s see:
Iran,
Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Does it begin to make sense now?
As for Трамп being a moral imbecile, and as for those who would deny such,
we have
the lovely video of the executive helping hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans by tossing out a handful of rolls of paper towels,
as well as his insistence upon
blaming the natural disaster on the Puerto Ricans themselves, and promising to cease federal aid.
We also have John Kelly, while defending Трамп,
confessing that the president had
asked him how to make condolence calls,
apparently because Трамп didn’t have a clue.
So Трамп made a condolence call to the widow of a fallen soldier,
telling her brusquely that, “He knew what he was signing up for.”
Richard Painter, the ethics chief under G.W. Bush, explained that Трамп
“has no understanding of human emotions.”
We had that much figured out already.
We had that much figured out decades ago.
How did Трамп happen, and why?
At the
basest level, we can see that lots of voters were still outraged that a black guy had been in the White House for eight years.
Two of the most popular potential replacements were a woman and a Jew.
That was unacceptable. It was time to get back to normality
and elect the white German male of pure “Aryan” stock.
There was a collective sigh of relief, articulated best by Pamela Ramsey Taylor, who posted:
(See also Chandrika Narayan, “Official Who Called Michelle Obama ‘Ape in Heels’ Gets Job Back,”
CNN, Wednesday, 14 December 2016.)
There were surely reasons other than anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-Semitic outrage,
and I’m certain that this question has been examined at length.
One reason, surely, was the certainty felt by the Religious Right that, whatever else its faults,
at least a Трамп administration would outlaw abortion.
That’s the logic, if I may be permitted to paraphrase:
“We don’t care if he’s a crook;
we don’t care if he’s a child molester;
we don’t care if he assaults women;
we don’t care if he’s a sexual predator;
we don’t care if he can’t even quote the bible;
we don’t care if he’s a fascist;
we don’t care if he’s declared us the enemy;
we don’t care if he’ll bankrupt us and give all our money to Wall Street billionaires;
all we care about is that he’ll put a stop to
all the baby-killers!”
For a nuanced and historically literate account of the degradation of the Religious Right,
one could do worse than read Michael Gerson’s
“The
Last Temptation:
How Evangelicals, Once Culturally Confident, Became an Anxious Minority Seeking Political Protection from the Least Traditionally Religious President in Living Memory,”
The Atlantic, April 2018.
Even taking all this into account, there’s yet another way to look at our current situation:
We can examine the advantages to the Paul Ryans and Charles Kochs and Paul Singers and Robert Mercers and Rebekah Mercers of the world.
Here’s one of the countless ways that Трамп’s new tax plan helps them: Matt Tinoco,
“Surprise! The Federal Government Spends More on Housing Assistance for the Rich than Housing Assistance for the Poor,”
Mother Jones, 11 October 2017.
Here are some ways that Трамп’s new tax plan would benefit Трамп:
John Cassidy, “How Trump’s Tax Plan Would Benefit Trump,”
The New Yorker, September 28, 2017.
We can also examine the advantages to the coal industry, the oil industry, and the pharmaceutical industry.
They’re all having a grand old time at the expense of all the rest of us.
What little sovereignty the American Indian nations had is now effectively gone for good.
Pretty soon there will be no unions, no labor movement, no job or safety protections,
probably
no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, and probably no retirement.
These last are being derided as “entitlement programs.” Entitlement?
We make a hefty investment, and yet claiming the returns is entitlement???????????
If I buy something, it’s mine.
Under the new tax law, if I buy something, it’s Paul Ryan’s.
This is a positive boon to the handful of those at the top.
After all, we do need to have some compassion for those at the top.
I mean, they have to put food on the dining-room table too.
Those of us who don’t even have dining rooms can surely relate.
One reason we should have compassion for those at the top of the pyramid is stated eloquently in this genteel ode to their virtue:
Larry Elliott, “World’s
Eight Richest People Have Same Wealth as Poorest 50%,” The Guardian, 15 January 2017.
Along this theme is another popular folk ballad, with music and lyrics by Ed Pilkington:
“Why
the UN Is Investigating Extreme Poverty... in America, the World’s Richest Nation,”
The Guardian, 1 December 2017.
I’ll never forget the day, probably in 2001 or 2002, when I saw Svetozar Stojanović sitting at a computer, surfing the Internet,
intently reading an article about how Bill Gates had more wealth than almost the entirety of Africa.
Still a bit stunned, he quietly looked up at me to remark, “This has never happened before.
This has never happened in all history.
In our world now, it has become the duty of the poor to pay the rich, and it has become the duty of the weak to protect the strong.”
Truer words were never spoken.
I mentioned that once to some folks at work.
One gal paused a beat and then cheerily blurted out:
“Well, we all doin’ our duty!”
As you can determine, I am far from an expert.
Nonetheless, I notice patterns.
It appears to me that Трамп and his string-pullers have several goals in mind.
First, of course, is to eliminate most taxes on the rich, shifting the burden onto the poor.
That has been a dream of the rich since forever.
Second, high office cannot be won without the support of Appalachia,
which explains the bible-waving and speeches with sometimes coded and sometimes brazen language promising to end abortion once and for all and forever.
Once those two goals are met, then they can get to the third: Eliminate affordable health care.
That leads naturally to the fourth goal: Eliminate health and safety regulations, so that billionaires need no longer waste money to protect their employees or anyone else.
Number four will be difficult, of course, so long as employees can organize, and so they have a fifth goal: Outlaw labor organizations.
That cannot be done in a single swell foop. No. It can be done only one step at a time, of course.
It will take three or four steps to outlaw unions altogether.
Before unions can be outlawed, the Supreme Court needs to rule that employees need the freedom to choose not to be protected;
they need the freedom, instead, to have the “Right to Work.”
Once “Right to Work” is universal, then there will be no effective resistance to the sixth goal: Slash Social Security.
Now we have a new tax law that, after an eight-year initiation period, will cause our taxes to skyrocket,
and that drastically reduces taxes on the rich,
and that bores a further $1,500,000,000,000 hole in our debt.
What was the point of robbing the poor in order to transfer trillions to the rich?
Was this simply greed?
It was greed, certainly, but not so simply.
Our owners understood something better than we did.
They understood how vulnerable this country was,
despite having the world’s largest economy and by far the world’s largest military.
Instead of strategizing to strengthen the US, they decided to
plunder the treasury
and then get away while the going was still good.
By robbing all the rest of us of our money, our insurance, our retirement, our health, our safety, they have successfully neutralized us.
Now Team Трамп has the US allying with longtime enemies and alienating longtime allies.
Brilliant.
The US’s days as a superpower had been numbered, yes,
but this current administration is ensuring that the numbered days will be as few as possible.
This is a coup d’état.
I never imagined that I would live through a coup d’état,
and even if I had imagined it, I would never have imagined that it would be conducted in this manner.
Instead of air raids, machine guns, bombs, and nerve gas,
what we got was voter suppression resulting in the largest transfer of wealth in all world history.
The revolution was almost peaceful, and I’m quite sure that more than half of the people in the US haven’t even noticed.
When did this revolution begin?
According to Franklin Foer, in “The
Plot Against America:
Decades Before He Ran the Trump Campaign, Paul Manafort’s Pursuit of Foreign Cash and Shady Deals Laid the Groundwork for the Corruption of Washington”
(The Atlantic, March 2018),
we can easily locate the START button in 1979/1980, during the Reagan campaign.
That makes sense to me.
There was decidedly a change right at that time.
Corruption, always endemic, was suddenly systemic.
So Manafort was the missing link in all these worldwide slaughters — Angola, Philippines, Nigeria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia....
I never would have guessed that everything was so interconnected.
There’s even a tie-in with the DeCavalcante family, and with Adnan Khashoggi, too!
My oh my oh my.
This even ties in with the Yugoslav civil war, a war that had left me entirely mystified for over two decades now.
Manafort rivals even Bob Guccione in the gentle art of backstabbing.
If you decide to read Foer’s article, and I hope you do,
you will enjoy the delicious irony about Manafort’s admiration of Niccolò Macchiavelli.
Despite popular belief, Macchiavelli never promoted autocracy;
on the contrary, he satirized it viciously (yes, The Prince is a satire), which is why he was tortured in prison.
Macchiavelli would have detested Manafort.
To return now to the transfer of wealth,
we see that another boon for our owners is the jettisoning of food and water safety — it is now permissible to poison drinking water and food; indeed, it is encouraged.
The health regulations are gone.
The Supreme Court is now just a rubber stamp for big industry, and this will never change.
Трамп uniquely encouraged racist violence at his rallies, doing all in his power to set people against one another.
Divide et impera.
That’s an old technique, but I was a bit surprised to see it played out so openly.
Трамп’s big cheerleaders were the
American Nazi Party, the
KKK,
Alex Jones, and
The National Enquirer, which won the day.
Weren’t those all supposedly the lunatic fringe — the lunatic fringe that would never have mass sway? We’re in trouble.
A guy I have worked with, not someone I would call dumb by any means, is totally pro-Трамп , he explains,
because Трамп was the only candidate who addressed his principal concern:
“He’s going to put a stop to the Muslims who are raping all our women!!!” he shouted.
What? Where on earth did that idea come from? Did it perchance come from Alex Jones?
As soon as we got off the phone, I checked out Jones’s website. Yup. That’s where it came from.
Трамп may well someday take credit for solving this nonexistent problem.
It’s so easy to put a stop to a crime that never happens.
What does all this tell us about the current state of the society of the United States?
There are supposed to be a few safety mechanisms in place to prevent such a turn of events. Well, there aren’t.
As for this bizarre fear of Muslims, how many people in this country can define the word “Muslim”?
How many people in this country can define the word “Islam”?
As for the violence the Muslims spread, who’s familiar with
this chart?
Not that this means diddly-squat, but no Muslim has ever given me the tiniest bit of grief.
I cannot say as much about white Christians. I wish I could, but I can’t.
As for how ordinary everyday Muslims feel about terrorism and ISIS and al-Qaeda and the Taliban and whatnot,
take a look:
Stan Grant, “Are Muslims Speaking Out against Terrorism? You Bet They Are,” The Link, 9 June 2017;
“Not in My Name — Muslims against ISIS”;
Sarah Walsh, “In a Time of Uncertainty, Cincinnati Muslims Focus on Reaching Out and Speaking Up,” WCPO 9 Cincinnati, 27 February 2017;
“Muslim Leaders & Community Members Speak Out against ISIS — Dearborn, Michigan”;
Ravi Baichwal, “Local Muslim Leaders Speak Out against Radicalization, ISIS,” Eyewitness News 7, Chicago;
Rick Aaron, “Utah Muslims Speak Out Against ISIS Atrocities,” ABC 4, 20 August 2014;
Yasmine Hafiz, “Sunni And Shiite British Imams Denounce ISIS Together In New Video,” Huffington Post, 12 July 2014.
When the USSR fell to pieces, the US military and its suppliers were worried sick that they would lose profits.
Since there was no longer a Red hiding under every bed, we needed a new enemy.
We conveniently got Saddam Hussein, who had made the fatal error of publicly agreeing to be paid for oil in Euros as well as in dollars.
When you say things like that, you get into trouble.
So we had Iraq as the enemy, though there were some half-hearted efforts to explain that not all Muslims are naughty — only the naughty ones are naughty.
This had some effect, but too many people saw through the straw man.
Overall, though, people here were simply confused, because people here don’t even know what Muslims are,
though they seem to have some vague memory of a couple of cartoon characters from the 1950’s.
We needed something more dramatic, something to which no sane person could disagree.
So we got 9/11 . That did the trick.
The new enemy arrived, just in the nick of time. Yay.
How, though, to single out only one group while sending out the signal that everybody else is nice?
Impossible.
Play it up, play it up big, play it up loudly.
So in the Трамп-view of the universe, the KKK was right and everybody else was wrong.
Sure, Трамп will put the occasional token person of color in his cabinet, to deflect criticism, but that doesn’t change the general tenor.
Now that all non-WASP’s are suspect,
the Трамп régime can attack another problem by making it worse:
Instead of helping refugees and immigrants,
instead of using diplomacy to make their parts of the world livable again, it is now time to go on the attack.
Get tough on these “bad hombres.”
Will this help?
Sure, it helps law enforcement, who now have more to do and can put in requisitions for more military equipment.
Sure, it helps the military, since the deportations will further destabilize the world and cause more wars.
Something else just occurred to me:
Since potential deportees dare not call for help, they are completely vulnerable.
Human traffickers need vulnerable victims.
Human trafficking is an immensely profitable industry, and among criminal enterprises, it ranks second only to drug trafficking.
Even if that was not one of the Трамп régime’s deliberate goals,
that was certainly an effect.
What is Трамп régime doing to ameliorate this? Hmmmm.
Now Alex Jones and Fox News are cheerleading Трамп’s arrests of refugee children as young as eight months old,
snatched from their parents by the US government, shipped hundreds of miles away to concentration camps,
as their parents are shipped to different concentration camps, or shipped to prison, or shipped back home to their executioners.
Despite what Трамп and his propagandists insist, these are not illegal immigrants.
No effort has been made to keep records of which children belong to which parents.
The trauma these families, especially the children, are suffering, will never be cured.
Fox News defends this.
Fox News finds this hilarious.
Alex Jones is celebrating.
I refuse to link to his site, but he posted a cartoon showing a heavily tatooed gang-banging Méxican holding his newborn in his arm,
protesting that the authorities are taking the baby from his loving father.
Enough.
The hateful scumbags who carrying out Трамп’s orders, and the hateful scumbags who are defending the orders, are beneath my contempt.
When this mess is over, if it is ever over, I want to devote the rest of my life to helping these refugees.
Would the day ever come when the entire Трамп crime family and all its co-conspirators are tried for crimes against humanity.
Remember back in school and college when our teachers and professors scoffed at conspiracy theorists?
Americans are such suckers for conspiracy theories, they would say, and they would insist that “There are no conspiracies!”
Conspiracy theories, they said, are the product of such disordered minds as those of Lyndon LaRouche and Garry Allen and John A. Stormer and so forth.
Okay. Fine.
Take a look at Jonathan Chait, “Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart — or His Handler?
A Plausible Theory of Mind-Boggling Collusion,”
New York, 8 July 2018.
For those who find this preposterous, note the press conference and the aftermath.
Better yet, we have Azeen Ghorayshi, “Trump’s Lawyer Said There Were ‘No Plans’ For Trump Tower Moscow. Here They Are,”
BuzzFeed, Tuesday, 22 January 2019.
That article led Frank Vyan Walton to post a timeline:
“Trump Tower Moscow Was a Much Larger Deal — and Potential Crime — Than Anyone Has Realized,” DailyKos, Sunday, 27 January 2019,
and what a timeline it is!
Again, no writer of fiction could possibly have invented this.
Among the minority who pay any serious attention to politics, there are two standard responses to current events:
(1) Justin Jouvenal,
“A
Teen Is Charged with Killing His Girlfriend’s Parents. They Had Worried He Was a Neo-Nazi ,” The Washington Post, Saturday, 23 December 2017; and
(2) David A. Lehrer, “Despite a Year of Anxiety, a Note of Hope,”
Jewish Journal, Wednesday, 20 December 2017.
Let us all strive to ensure that (2) prevails.
There is much here I do not understand.
The Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, no longer exists. It has not a single member.
The party that now calls itself Republican touts its “conservatism,” though nothing it does is conservative in any way at all.
Current-day “conservatism” and “liberalism” would be unrecognizable to their founders.
A primary tenet of American conservatism is the need for accountable and representational government, to prevent tyranny.
American conservatism demands a government that is responsive to its citizens, that is accountable to its citizens, and that serves its citizens,
rather than a system in which citizens are duty-bound to serve the government.
American conservatism demands a government that does not regulate opinions or personal behavior, provided that the behavior is not violent or destructive.
More simply put, in nearly every civilization, the government told its citizens what to do.
In the US, the system was — at least nominally — the reverse:
The citizens would tell their government what to do.
(Yes, there were massive loopholes for the upper classes, unfortunately, but even so, it was an ingenious idea, taken in part from Classical Athens,
and taken in even greater part from the American Indians, especially the Haudenosaunee “Iroquois” confederation,
but it was then polluted with the structure of the British monarchy.)
Liberals agree with all these tenets, by the way, but add one more ingredient: a mixed economy in order to maintain an even playing field and to prevent plutocracy.
These are all good goals.
These are the goals that every Republican fights against tooth and nail.
Republicans demand “small” government not to promote accountability or representation,
but to prevent it.
So current-day “Republicans,” calling for ever-smaller government, make the government ever-larger, and they spy on every last one of us.
They do this, they say, because they do not trust government.
Of course, the only reason government cannot be trusted is because maniacs such as these are in charge of it.
Charles Koch, who effectively runs the US, opposes Трамп, even though the Трамп administration is making him richer than ever.
It is the Koch-funded think-tanks that, in part, are responsible for the current lingo,
in which “smaller” now simply means privatized.
A forest, a protected site, the water, the air, can now be owned by Koch Industries or other such entities,
who can and do boot all the rest of us out.
Don’t believe that? Well, just ask the Osage Indians for their opinion.
Politicians of both parties are in the Koch family’s pockets, and so they do as the Kochs tell them.
If they don’t, their careers are instantly destroyed.
What on earth is going on?
This is terribly difficult to puzzle out, but one person, quite by accident, has puzzled much of it out.
Her name is Nancy MacLean, and she has just published one of the most important books ever written:
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017).
I never knew, and I suppose almost nobody ever knew, that the modern so-called Republican Party
is largely the invention of James McGill Buchanan.
Have you ever heard of him? I hadn’t.
He was evil to the nth degree, disingenuous and dishonest to his core.
It figures that he was a professor respected enough to be funded to tour colleges of the world to propound his blather.
It figures that he won the Nobel Prize for his loathsome “economic theories.”
Seeking for years to concoct a water-tight theory to justify, morally, the dominance of the super-rich and the subservience of everybody else,
Buchanan and others like him (Floyd Arthur “Baldy” Harper, Robert LeFevre, Murray Rothbard, Edward Crane III, and so forth)
came up with marvelous arguments, ingeniously constructed logical fallacies.
Learning about these at last makes sense of the peculiar use of language, the Newspeak,
now employed by big business and “Republicans” and news commentators and countless brainwashed zombies roaming our streets,
in which “special-interest groups” are public servants;
in which “liberty” means the liberty of the richest to deprive everyone else of liberty;
in which “serfdom” refers to civil rights that offer the rest of us the ability to have a say in our lives;
in which “tyranny” is the ability of ordinary people to cast votes and to have those votes counted;
in which “despotism” is taxation of the rich to support projects they find abhorrent, specifically anything that helps the less-than-rich;
in which “victims” are the super-rich whites suffering at the hands of labor unions and safety regulations.
Currently, the disciples of Buchanan (the Kochs and the Mercers and the other oligarchs) are enthusiastically stripping out regulations
and the ability to organize in order, they say, to grant us our “freedom,”
namely, the freedom from legal protections,
the freedom from redress of grievances,
the freedom from organizing into groups to lobby for civil rights,
the freedom from safety,
the freedom from breathable air and drinkable water and edible food,
the freedom from health insurance,
the freedom from the ability to earn a living wage,
the freedom from the right to vote.
This is literally how they understand the word “freedom,”
for it is this freedom that guarantees protection of their vast wealth.
To quote Nancy MacLean (pp. 139–140):
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[Edward Crane III] had served as a precinct captain for Barry Goldwater in 1964, but he was
disgusted by “how quickly Goldwater ran away from the issue of privatizating
Social Security.” Blaming Goldwater’s retreat on his effort to win over
the majority of voters (and recoiling, too, from the senator’s military adventurism),
Crane went on to join the Libertarian Party, which had been
summoned into being in a Denver living room in December 1971. Its
founders sought a world in which liberty was preserved by the total absence
of government coercion in any form. That entailed the end of public
education, Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, minimum
wage laws, prohibitions against child labor, foreign aid, the Environmental
Protection Agency, prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution —
and, in time, the end of taxes and government regulations of any kind.
And those were just the marquee targets.
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Here is a lovely documentary on how the Republican Party was usurped by the Tea Party:
Crashing The Tea Party, https://youtu.be/T0Yv5b7y__c
So much for the Republican Party’s claim to conservatism.
Here is another lovely documentary, by Republicans!!!!!, on what is wrong.
This is about the strongest condemnation of Trumpism I have ever seen:
The Sociopath, https://youtu.be/NIL0w4BkHQU
Those uneducated
They constitute nearly half the population in this country.
Yet there are countless people in the US who still champion the so-called Republican party as the exemplars of conservatism.
That is certifiably insane.
Here is a good commentary showing that the current Republican party, far from being conservative,
has actually been on a decades-long mission of subverting the government
and attacking anyone and everyone who is not a billionaire.
Thus is the term “conservative” being redefined in practice to mean something like fascism, which is its polar opposite.
Peculiarly, though both major parties forever try to one-up each other
in their flamboyant displays of overt Christian piety — or what they purport to be Christian piety —
it comes as a surprise (or does it?) that Buchanan and the Kochs and the others of their school of thought
are militant atheists who look down their noses at believers.
It is this handful of élite power-brokers who illustrate one of our current major problems.
Let us assume that there are 261 work days each year, and that each work day is eight hours, for a total of 2,088 work hours per year.
Using those two assumptions, we can perform some simple arithmetic
to see what executives earn:
David N. Farr, Emerson Electric Co., $7,231.80 per hour
Richard K. Templeton, Texas Instruments, Inc., $7,231.80 per hour
John D. Idol, Michael Kors Holdings, Ltd., $7,231.80 per hour
Christopher M. Crane, Exelon Corp., $7,279.69 per hour
William C. Rhodes III, Autozone, Inc., $7,327.59 per hour
Richard K. Davis, US Bankcorp, $7,327.59 per hour
Vernon J. Nagel, Acuity Brands., Inc., $7,327.59 per hour
Omar Ishrak, Medtronic PLC, $7,327.59 per hour
Thomas J. Falk, Kimberly Clark Corp., $7,519.16 per hour
Gregory Hayes, United Technologies Corp., $7,567.05 per hour
Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America Corp., $7,614.94 per hour
Charles H. Robbins, Cisco Systems, Inc., $7,662.84 per hour
Jeff M. Fettig, Whirlpool Corp., $7,710.73 per hour
Eric C. Wiseman, V F Corp., $7,806.51 per hour
Charles W. Scharf, Visa, Inc., $7,854.41 per hour
Gary J. Goldberg, Newmont Mining Corp., $7,950.19 per hour
Gary R. Heminger, Marathon Petroleum Corp., $7,950.19 per hour
Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts, Inc., $7,998.08 per hour
Klaus Kleinfeld, Alcoa, Inc., $8,045.98 per hour
Frederick W. Smith, FedEx Corp., $8,045.98 per hour
Ian C. Read, Pfizer, Inc., $8,285.44 per hour
Muhtar Ahmet Kent, Coca Cola Company, $8,429.12 per hour
Satya Nadella, Microsoft Corp., $8,477.01 per hour
Pierre Nanterme, Accenture PLC, $8,860.15 per hour
Samuel R. Allen. Deere & Co., $8,908.05 per hour
Paal Kibsgaard, Schlumberger, Ltd., $8,908.05 per hour
W. Nicholas Howley. Transdigm Group, Inc., $8,955.94 per hour
Brad D. Smith, Intuit, Inc., $9,003.83 per hour
Stuart A. Miller, Lennar Corp., $9,195.40 per hour
Gerald L. Hassell, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., $9,195.40 per hour
Carol Meyrowitz, TJX Companies, Inc., $9,386.97 per hour
Bruce D. Broussard, Humana, Inc., $9,434.87 per hour
Gary E. Dickerson, Applied Materials, Inc., $9,434.87 per hour
C. Douglas McMillon, Walmart Stores, Inc., $9,482.76 per hour
Richard J. Kramer, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, $9,482.76 per hour
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Systems, Inc., $9,578.54 per hour
Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., $9,674.33 per hour
Miles D. White, Abbott Laboratories, $9,722.22 per hour
Daniel P. Amos, AFLAC, Inc., $9,770.11 per hour
Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric Company, $10,201.15 per hour
David M. Cote, Honeywell International, Inc., $10,201.15 per hour
Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks Corp., $10,440.61 per hour
Michael F. Neidorff, Centene Corp., $10,536.40 per hour
John H. Hammergren, McKesson Corp., $11,302.68 per hour
Hock E. Tan, Broadcom, Ltd., $11,829.50 per hour
James R. Murdoch, Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc., $12,643.68 per hour
Alex Gorsky, Johnson & Johnson, $12,883.14 per hour
Thomas E. Dooley, Viacom, Inc., $13,362.07 per hour
Stephen A. Wynn, Wynn Resorts, Ltd., $13,505.75 per hour
Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T, Inc., $13,601.53 per hour
Dion J. Weisler, HP, Inc., $13,745.21 per hour
Virginia M. Rometty, IBM Corp., $15,660.92 per hour
Marc Benioff, Salesforce.Com, Inc., $15,996.17 per hour
Margaret C. Whitman, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, $17,049.81 per hour
Safra A. Catz, Oracle Corporation, $19,588.12 per hour
Mark V. Hurd, Oracle Corporation, $19,683.91 per hour
Robert A. Iger, Walt Disney Company, $21,024.90 per hour
Alex A. Molinaroli, Johnson Controls International, PLC, $22,222.22 per hour
Mark G. Parker, Nike, Inc., $22,796.93 per hour
Fabrizio Freda, Estee Lauder Companies, Ind., $23,180.08 per hour
Thomas M. Rutledge, Charter Communications, Inc., $47,174.33 per hour
Richard K. Templeton, Texas Instruments, Inc., $7,231.80 per hour
John D. Idol, Michael Kors Holdings, Ltd., $7,231.80 per hour
Christopher M. Crane, Exelon Corp., $7,279.69 per hour
William C. Rhodes III, Autozone, Inc., $7,327.59 per hour
Richard K. Davis, US Bankcorp, $7,327.59 per hour
Vernon J. Nagel, Acuity Brands., Inc., $7,327.59 per hour
Omar Ishrak, Medtronic PLC, $7,327.59 per hour
Thomas J. Falk, Kimberly Clark Corp., $7,519.16 per hour
Gregory Hayes, United Technologies Corp., $7,567.05 per hour
Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America Corp., $7,614.94 per hour
Charles H. Robbins, Cisco Systems, Inc., $7,662.84 per hour
Jeff M. Fettig, Whirlpool Corp., $7,710.73 per hour
Eric C. Wiseman, V F Corp., $7,806.51 per hour
Charles W. Scharf, Visa, Inc., $7,854.41 per hour
Gary J. Goldberg, Newmont Mining Corp., $7,950.19 per hour
Gary R. Heminger, Marathon Petroleum Corp., $7,950.19 per hour
Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts, Inc., $7,998.08 per hour
Klaus Kleinfeld, Alcoa, Inc., $8,045.98 per hour
Frederick W. Smith, FedEx Corp., $8,045.98 per hour
Ian C. Read, Pfizer, Inc., $8,285.44 per hour
Muhtar Ahmet Kent, Coca Cola Company, $8,429.12 per hour
Satya Nadella, Microsoft Corp., $8,477.01 per hour
Pierre Nanterme, Accenture PLC, $8,860.15 per hour
Samuel R. Allen. Deere & Co., $8,908.05 per hour
Paal Kibsgaard, Schlumberger, Ltd., $8,908.05 per hour
W. Nicholas Howley. Transdigm Group, Inc., $8,955.94 per hour
Brad D. Smith, Intuit, Inc., $9,003.83 per hour
Stuart A. Miller, Lennar Corp., $9,195.40 per hour
Gerald L. Hassell, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., $9,195.40 per hour
Carol Meyrowitz, TJX Companies, Inc., $9,386.97 per hour
Bruce D. Broussard, Humana, Inc., $9,434.87 per hour
Gary E. Dickerson, Applied Materials, Inc., $9,434.87 per hour
C. Douglas McMillon, Walmart Stores, Inc., $9,482.76 per hour
Richard J. Kramer, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, $9,482.76 per hour
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Systems, Inc., $9,578.54 per hour
Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., $9,674.33 per hour
Miles D. White, Abbott Laboratories, $9,722.22 per hour
Daniel P. Amos, AFLAC, Inc., $9,770.11 per hour
Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric Company, $10,201.15 per hour
David M. Cote, Honeywell International, Inc., $10,201.15 per hour
Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks Corp., $10,440.61 per hour
Michael F. Neidorff, Centene Corp., $10,536.40 per hour
John H. Hammergren, McKesson Corp., $11,302.68 per hour
Hock E. Tan, Broadcom, Ltd., $11,829.50 per hour
James R. Murdoch, Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc., $12,643.68 per hour
Alex Gorsky, Johnson & Johnson, $12,883.14 per hour
Thomas E. Dooley, Viacom, Inc., $13,362.07 per hour
Stephen A. Wynn, Wynn Resorts, Ltd., $13,505.75 per hour
Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T, Inc., $13,601.53 per hour
Dion J. Weisler, HP, Inc., $13,745.21 per hour
Virginia M. Rometty, IBM Corp., $15,660.92 per hour
Marc Benioff, Salesforce.Com, Inc., $15,996.17 per hour
Margaret C. Whitman, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, $17,049.81 per hour
Safra A. Catz, Oracle Corporation, $19,588.12 per hour
Mark V. Hurd, Oracle Corporation, $19,683.91 per hour
Robert A. Iger, Walt Disney Company, $21,024.90 per hour
Alex A. Molinaroli, Johnson Controls International, PLC, $22,222.22 per hour
Mark G. Parker, Nike, Inc., $22,796.93 per hour
Fabrizio Freda, Estee Lauder Companies, Ind., $23,180.08 per hour
Thomas M. Rutledge, Charter Communications, Inc., $47,174.33 per hour
This list is of salaried executives only, and does not include entrepreneurs such as Charles Koch and Paul Singer and Robert Mercer.
When we check into the annual incomes of such entrepreneurs, our spirits, thankfully, are at long last lifted:
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, $4,310,344.83 per hour
Jeff Bezos, Amazon/Whole Foods/Washington Post, over $17,097,701.15 per hour
Many, most, or perhaps all of the above people find that the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is extortionate, since mere wage earners, they say, are inferior, are failures, and have done nothing to earn such lofty compensation. Many, most, or perhaps all of the above want you to believe that your monetary problems are the fault of greedy union workers or of immigrants. Yeah, right. This is North America, the land of the potlatch. Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, $4,310,344.83 per hour
Jeff Bezos, Amazon/Whole Foods/Washington Post, over $17,097,701.15 per hour
Many, most, or perhaps all of the above people find that the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is extortionate, since mere wage earners, they say, are inferior, are failures, and have done nothing to earn such lofty compensation. Many, most, or perhaps all of the above want you to believe that your monetary problems are the fault of greedy union workers or of immigrants. Yeah, right. This is North America, the land of the potlatch. Yeah.
Everyone who has a Facebook account, which I assume is almost every person on the planet who has an Internet connection, is passively and/or actively contributing to Zuckerberg’s salary.
Give it up.
Now.
Give up all your antisocial media. Now.
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Megan Cerullo, “Mark Zuckerberg congratulated President Trump on a successful campaign after his election victory,”
NY Daily News, 19 July 2018:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called then president-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, according to a new report.
Zuckerberg placed the secret call sometime in the days after the election to heap praise on the Trump team for its successful use of Facebook as an advertising platform,
BuzzFeed News reported.
Facebook has acknowledged in internal memos and presentations how successful Trump was at leveraging the social network to reach voters.
Facebook even used the then-Republican candidate’s strategy to hone a model —
called “Test, Learn, Adapt” — to evaluate its own advertising, according to the report.
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That begins to explain the
I basically agree.
Then there is a fascinating lecture by ex-CIA Ray McGovern.
Theoretically, everything he says seems to be reasonable,
but he cherry picks the evidence.
I think he’s basically an honest guy.
I don’t think he cherry picked with malice aforethought.
He did the best he knew how with the information at hand,
and in that respect he is probably typical of people who work in the intelligence community,
which is reason for all of us to worry.
What Ray says here was my basic inclination.
Yet the oddest things keep happening that could not possibly happen were Ray correct on this issue.
In response to the evidence reported, or misreported, in the news, I changed my mind in light of the ongoing investigations.
Then I changed it back, and then back again.
What clinched it for me was this article:
Kerry Howley, “‘The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread’:
Not Every Leaker Is an Ideological Combatant Like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Reality Winner May Be the Unlikeliest of All,”
New York, 22 December 2017.
The last of my doubts is gone.
Yes, the Putin régime absolutely hacked our 2016 election.
Did “Guccifer 2.0” a/k/a “Fancy Bear” hack into the DNC computers and siphon off emails?
Yes, but that’s not necessarily how Wikileaks got the emails.
Unbeknownst to “Fancy Bear,” there was also someone called “Cozy Bear” who was scouring the DNC server.
So was it “Cozy Bear” who shot the emails over to Wikileaks?
Maybe. I don’t know.
So how did Wikileaks get the emails?
Another possibility:
Someone at the DNC leaked them.
Who?
Answer: Someone who was on more than one payroll.
What is the truth? We may never know.
Let’s back up a little bit.
Almost nobody in the US knows about recent Russian history.
Did I know much? No. So I’ve been learning, perhaps not as assiduously as I should, but I am learning.
Here is a wonderful overview, extremely informative, which makes so much sense of what had appeared senseless:
Here’s a somewhat different perspective, but equally important:
So there you go: By watching the above two videos, you get, in a mere few hours,
an astonishing education, better than you would get in several years of graduate school.
This was not possible just twenty years ago.
I dread the day when the authorities take this tool away from us.
Then we have an important article that makes even more sense out of what had appeared senseless:
Franklin Foer, “Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America: When the U.S.S.R. Collapsed, Washington Bet on the Global Spread of Democratic Capitalist Values — and Lost,” The Atlantic, March 2019. (The
Once you have digested those two pieces, you will understand the next piece:
Tom Burgis, “Tower of Secrets: The Russian Money behind a Donald Trump Skyscraper: The Trump Toronto Reveals the Links between a Shadowy World of
Admittedly, under Clinton, the tensions between the West and Russia would have grown ominously.
See, for instance, Andrew E. Kramer,
“Russia
Calls New U.S. Missile Defense System a ‘Direct Threat’,”
The New York Times, 12 May 2016.
Russia found the prospect of a Clinton presidency intolerable,
and thus had every incentive to do what it could to bend the US election to its favor.
Russia really did have security concerns, and the US did nothing to allay them.
Bad move, on all sides.
Despite Russian interference in our election, I am inclined to stick with my original conclusion that, in November 2016,
only two votes mattered:
Paul Singer’s and
Semion Mogilevich’s.
In light of recent revelations, I would add one more name, and say that only three votes mattered.
The third name:
Oleg Deripaska.
Have you ever had so much fun reading a legal document?
This is brilliant work, and I can’t begin to imagine how Mueller’s team dug up some of this information.
So, after reading this indictment, how willing will you be to believe the next political ad?
How willing will you be to join the next fishy-sounding activist group?
How willing will you be to accept ideology, any ideology?
How willing will you be to accept the next smear campaign as legitimate reporting?
Fine. Whatever.
There are things here I don’t understand.
If this indictment is the sum total of the Mueller team’s prosecution, then we’re all in trouble.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, for only Russian nationals are named, and there is no way on earth Russia will extradite them for hearings in the US.
(Katelyn Polantz, “Special Counsel Hits Snag in Bringing a Criminal Case against Russians,” CNN, 4 May 2018.
This is a surprise?)
So if this is Team Mueller’s final end product, then it does no good, except to serve as entertainment.
Will there be more indictments? Will Americans be indicted?
Putting all that aside, what do we learn from this marvelous 37-page masterwork of prose composition?
One thing I learn from it is that I was wrong.
I had assumed that anti-Commie Sanders would have been a sore spot for Russia.
We learn now that he would have had Russia’s support. I’m aghast.
How do the so-called conservatives relay the tale?
Predictably, with fractional and misleading reporting, employing that old war-horse, the association fallacy:
Alex Pappas, “Indictment Reveals Russians also Organized Anti-Trump Rallies after Election,” Fox News, 16 February 2018.
Fox thus implies that all anti-Трамп protests are orchestrated by Russia. Yeah, right.
Let’s go further, this time into the dangerous realm of Alex Jones and his appropriately named InfoWars.
You never knew why Jones called it that, did you?
Now that you’ve read the indictment, you understand, yes?
Here’s Jones’s take on the indictment, and I won’t provide a hyperlink, because I don’t wish to pollute my web site:
“Live: Trump Cleared! Mueller Admits Russian Investigation Over:
There Never Was Collusion Between Trump and Russia,” 17 February 2018.
Really, now? Really?
Is this guy physically capable of telling anything remotely resembling the truth?
The title is enough for me. I refuse to watch the video, for I do not wish to add hypertension to my list of ailments.
Fox and Jones, yes, they share something in common:
They gamble that their readers-viewers-listeners will never bother to check the sources,
and will just simply gobble down whatever nonsense their so-called journalists choose to peddle.
For the most part, I think, they’re safe in that gamble.
Back to Team Mueller.
Their document demonstrates the truth of the old adage that a vote for a third-party candidate is actually a vote for the ultimate winner.
Third parties, unfortunately, can serve only as distractions.
Let us hope this can change. Let us try to change this.
As I hope you have by now discerned, our two main parties are not our friends.
This document demonstrates, additionally, that nobody was worth voting for, and this is our tragedy.
A vote for any presidential candidate was just a vote for or against Russia.
Isn’t that strange?
Now, don’t let that discourage you from voting. We need everybody to vote.
So-called “Republican” votes count considerably more than other votes,
which is why the minority so frequently “wins” elections.
(More about this below.)
As we know, there is voter suppression, and it is widespread.
For instance, take a look at this frightening article:
Pema Levy, “These
Three Lawyers Are Quietly Purging Voter Rolls Across the Country: The Trump Administration Could Soon Follow Their Lead,”
Mother Jones, 7 July 2017.
This is not an isolated case:
John Myers, “Conservative Activist Group Files a Lawsuit over Los Ángeles County ‘Inactive Voter’ List,
The Los Ángeles Times, 15 December 2017.
Now, courtesy of the Supreme Court, it is worse.
On 11 June 2018 the Supreme Court decided in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute that racially motivated vote suppression is perfectly legal.
On 25 June 2018 the Supreme Court decided in Abbott v. Perez that racially motivated gerrymandering is in most cases perfectly legal.
Here’s a cheery story
about how Republicans finagled Michigan’s congressional districts to lock out “Dem garbage” in a state that is predominantly blue.
See? I knew that would make you smile.
Until recently, Republicans needed about 43% to win, while Democrats needed about 57% to win.
(See below for an explanation of that seeming impossibility.)
The scale has just tipped even more egregiously, and this will continue to get worse.
We need all the votes we can get. So vote.
Yes, I confess, I am tremendously grateful to our current administration for two things:
First, this administration has proved how wrong my ideas about the government were.
I had thought that politicians could operate only within a predetermined wiggle room — yes, even Nixon.
I never imagined that a president and his appointees could do any darned thing they pleased.
Second, I am thrilled that this administration is providing us more entertainment than we can handle.
We’re goin’ down, but at least we’re laughin’.
Well, we were laughing until Трамп put the US Federal Government in the child-abduction
and child-abuse business.
Once in a while, life plays a nice joke on us, and we can all laugh.
In this instance, Manafort’s lawyer submitted a statement to court,
but parts were “redacted,” or blacked out, to hide sensitive information.
Whoever did the redaction, whether the lawyer’s secretary, or a secretary at the court, neglected to “flatten” the result.
So yippee yippee yippee yay, we can reveal the secrets!
Simple Google searches also reveal the likely identities of the pseudonyms.
Yeeheeeeee!
Original:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5677512/Manafort-20190108-Dc.pdf
Redactions revealed: here
Redactions revealed: here
For no reason I can discern, I ended up on a list-serve called Quora.
I had never heard of it, I had never asked to be on it, I never subscribed to it, but nonetheless....
I hate to admit it, but sometimes there’s good stuff on those endless time-consuming scrolls.
Here’s one that caught my attention:
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Answer • The United States of America • Topic you might like
Is Trump destroying the international position of the USA?
I don’t think Putin would have been able to extract such devotion from Trump
if all Putin had were a series of videotapes of Trump’s people urinating on furniture that Obama slept in.
What I believe is that Trump and the Republican party were promised that Putin’s social-media trolls would swing all upcoming elections
to ensure a permanent Republican majority in the White House, Congress and the Courts.
And the reason why Trump is behaving so recklessly right now is that he knows the next two big elections are already fixed.
Now, swaying the votes of the millions of brain-challenged Trump voters is not as hard as it seems,
as millions of people watch Alex Jones, a man who, throughout the last election cycle,
bellowed incessantly that Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran a pedophilia Den of Horrors beneath a Washington DC pizzeria.
Not surprisingly, in late 2016, an Alex Jones fan snapped, traveled to DC, and opened fire at the restaurant targeted by Alex.
The man was led away by police, dazed and befuddled.
The price Trump and the GOP must pay for guaranteed political dominance is to agree to fatally weaken all previous American alliances,
a task which the GOP doesn’t mind, since GOP doctrine teaches that all Western Europe is a liberal trashbin (yes, all of it),
and thus, the GOP does not at all mind being tasked with cutting those ties,
and Trump is the perfect clown for lighting a reckless political fire under an entire continent —
the continent that only reached political stability in the last 70 years, after hundreds of years of constant bloodletting.
Putin, usually the smartest man in the room, well understands that as Trump works to discredit Moderate European leaders,
only Nationalist leaders are waiting in the wings, waiting to bring back most of the alliances and prejudices
that almost ended human life on planet Earth in the previous century.
And Republicans, although guaranteed power by Putin, are not guaranteed a brain, and deep in their Trump-fueled stupor,
the GOP will realize far too late that a Nationalist-led Europe is, indeed, a threat to... well, everything (just ask a WW2 survivor).
Finally, part Three of Putin’s plan is to emerge from the ruckus as the only sane leader in the Western world,
having financed the dim-witted GOP goal to permanently marginalize the Democrats,
Putin can then extract a mighty price for culling the Jew-hating, openly-Nazi Nationalists
we’ll see goose-stepping all across Europe after the Merkels and the Mays and the Macrons are hounded from office.
The above is what happens when the USA openly and proudly elects a narcissistic idiot as President,
and yet, still expects to be regarded as a serious player on the world stage (we are not. America has become a joke).
And, thus, as an American, I would advise European leaders to cut their losses,
demand USA troops leave, and USA installations close down, because as long as Trump is in charge,
the USA is nobody’s friend (except perhaps North Korea’s), and until us Americans can clean up this electoral mess that the GOP has created,
we well deserve to be treated as pariahs by the entire developed world.
And to help understand what might be the results of such estrangement from America’s traditional allies,
here’s a link to an article about the British Secret Service’s top spy in Al Qaeda,
the work he did in 2003 to undermine an imminent attack in a crowded New York subway, work he did at great peril to himself.
He readily shared details of the plan with the CIA, which helped coordinate the prevention of the attack.
So here’s a message for all Trump voters:
Those are the type of friends you are betraying.
Perhaps after Putin emerges calm and Buddha-like, smirking over a Europe overrun by skinheads,
Trump voters might get a real glimpse of what fools they have been.
A commentator on my post pointed out that many people listen to Alex Jones for comic value, and don’t necessary believe every word that comes out of his mouth.
I responded as follows:
“Alex Jones has destroyed lives, destroyed reputations, spread malice in very serious ways,
and has helped blur the line between entertainment and journalism in a way
that allows him to spread serious slander and take down good and honest people, then he turns around and says,
‘Hey, I’m just a circus clown.’
Many listeners use Alex’s over-the-top animal/human hybrid episodes as an example of Alex The Clown.
But Alex, here in the real world, helped elect Donald Trump,
and nudges people into this grey area in which viewers can repeat the slanderous and horrible things he says,
then backtrack and giggle that they were only joking. That’s dishonest, and it’s also the wave of the GOP future.
Such techniques work; they help get nutcases elected,
and will help transform history’s most successful and enlightened democracy
into a twisted house of mirrors where all truth is obfuscated by clowns like Alex Jones and his listeners.”
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Growing up, I occasionally heard the propagandistic line that when the US fell, Russia would fall too, and vice versa.
I thought that was a load of codswallop.
Now I see that there was an element of truth to that bogus aphorism, though probably an unintentional element of truth.
Both the US and Russia have fallen.
This is going to get too messy for my liking.
Russia is now in the grip of a handful of the world’s most dangerous gangsters,
and the US has fallen prey to Eric Prince and Blackwater, the president’s personal mercenary troops, beyond the reach of the law.
This is not good.
Can we rescue these two countries somehow?
I doubt we can, because the planet is heating and the Arctic permafrost is offgassing methane
as the modern incarnations of Russia and the US both insist that there is no climate problem,
and as the US fires its best scientists.
In truth, though, Russian infiltration into US politics is nothing new, and it hardly began with Трамп:
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John Solomon and Alison Spann, “FBI
Uncovered Russian Bribery Plot before Obama Administration Approved Controversial Nuclear Deal with Moscow,” The Hill, 17 October 2017.
In retrospect, this is not a surprise at all — but only in retrospect.
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Amazed always by my blatant dumbnitude, dunderheadedness, thickskullery, something now occurs to me that should have occurred to me right away.
Obama promised to go gently on whistle blowers.
Then he went ballistic with Assange and Snowden. Why?
Well, after a few years, his beef with Assange began to make perfect sense.
Obama was right.
Still, though, I couldn’t understand his hostility towards Snowden.
Snowden, I thought, and many others thought, was just a whistle blower. Nope.
Granted, his revelations about the extent of surveillance and invasion of privacy were not a surprise.
We had this figured out already, at least as far as the basics were concerned.
Now, though, I understand, and now I agree.
Both Assange and Snowden are tools of the Kremlin.
Obama was between a rock and a hard place.
How was he to present this information in a reasonable-sounding way? Impossible.
On the 13th of March 2018 there appeared on bookshop shelves a magnificent, juicy, un-put-down-able volume:
Here are two excerpts:
“What
Happened in Moscow: The Inside Story of How Trump’s Obsession With Putin Began” (Mother Jones, 8 March 2018) and
“Why the Hell Are We Standing Down?”
(Mother Jones, 9 March 2018).
Seldom have I been so impressed by journalism. This is top-of-the-line.
Now that we have this info, I understand why we are being cursed by an Assange and by a Snowden.
Nick Anderson published this marvelous cartoon on Monday, 16 April 2018.
Unexpectedly, the Russian Roulette book explains what a predicament Comey was in.
He had no choice but to do what he did. Really.
Sounds unbelievable, but he really had no choice.
As for the book: Yum yum yum. Brilliant reporting, even-handed, and totally damning.
It raises questions, though.
The intelligence agencies, together with the Democratic party, thought that regardless of election tampering, Clinton would win.
How could they have thought that?
Didn’t they know about gerrymandering?
Didn’t they know about the evisceration of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965?
Didn’t they know about Crosscheck?
How on earth could they have thought Clinton could possibly win?
Apparently Isikoff and Corn are unaware of these developments, either that or they think they are insignificant, for they make not a mention of such things in their tome.
Further, John Brennan, CIA head, had an idea that I find a bit bizarre:
“Brennan was thinking about the lessons of the 9/11
attack. Al Qaeda had been able to pull off that operation partly
because U.S. intelligence agencies — several of which had collected
bits of intelligence regarding the plotters before the attack — had not
shared the material within the intelligence community” (p. 184).
That is accurate, but fractional.
Does Brennan not realize that there was considerably more going on than Al Qaeda?
Or is he just being discreet?
One further thought: If those in authority know full well that online storage and email messages are so vulnerable to attack,
then why do they post anything sensitive on online storage and in email messages?
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Humans lived satisfactory lives without Internet hookups for hundreds of millennia.
Until recently, votes were counted quite quickly and efficiently by hand.
What is wrong with using paper? Why is there now such a resistance to using paper?
I don’t understand.
This situation raises a different question:
Why would the intelligence agencies assume that Hillary Clinton would win the election?
Greg Palast was pretty sure she was doomed.
I knew, from the moment Трамп announced his candidacy, that he would be the next president.
If this was obvious to me, why was it not obvious to the intelligence agencies?
There is an explanation.
Once upon a time, many moons ago, before I had a job, I read a book about job opportunities.
The intelligence agencies were among those mentioned in that book, of which author, title, and publisher have all vanished from my memory.
This book mentioned that anyone who had a 4.0 average, or preferably above 4.0, would be visited by the CIA and would likely receive a job offer.
The CIA, you see, like all the intelligence agencies, prizes intelligence, and wants only the cream of the crop among its ranks.
There is a massive problem, though, with 4.0 averages.
Students who maintain a straight 100% on all papers and tests, with higher points yet for the extra-credit assignments,
are not necessarily the cream of the crop.
A few are, probably, but the 4.0 students I encountered in school were really nothing special.
They came from comfortable homes; they received tutoring at home, putting them several years ahead of their fellow students; they were pushed by their parents;
and they perfected short-term memorization tricks.
For these students, school was a cinch.
In truth, though, almost any student who receives tutoring at home, is pushed by parents, and practices short-term memorization tricks would do just as well.
A 4.0 average is not indicative of intelligence.
The 4.0 students from back in my school days seemed to be decent folk, but they were not creative thinkers.
They learned formulæ and, when confronted with a problem, applied the requisite formula.
If the CIA and the other agencies fill their offices with such people, they will be doomed to make dumb mistakes, lethal mistakes,
such as destabilizing Cambodia, or attacking Panama or Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua, or assisting with the Iran-Contra affair,
or conducting Project MKUltra experiments, or engaging in any of a million other sadistic and utterly inhumane disasters.
The ability to think problems through, to see the broader picture, to find responsible solutions,
to resist commands from clearly insane political authorities, is not an attribute of any 4.0 I ever met.
Creative thinkers, in my limited experience, come from disadvantage and need to improvise problem-solving in original ways.
There is probably little overlap between creative thinking and 4.0.
In my experience, actually, there is no overlap.
Yes, of course the average 4.0’ would probably assume that Hillary Clinton would win, given the polls and the trends.
Yes, of course the average 4.0’ would discount any claim of vote rigging, because they learned that the government doesn’t work that way,
and the only people making the claim are the Greg Palasts of the world, who have no official credentials,
together with “leftist” groups such as Let America Vote.
Yes, of course the average 4.0’ would laugh at the idea that Cambridge Analytica could reverse voters’ opinions.
No, of course the average 4.0’ would not be able to see around the bend to determine Russia’s plans,
because that’s not how international politics works.
Put two and two and two and two together, and the answer is Трамп.
Nice job, boys. How did that work out for you?
Oh. Here’s a new anecdote, and it explains too much.
The CIA, the FBI, and many police departments use a mind-reading scam called SCAN,
which is an acronym for Scientific Content Analysis.
Read the article about it: Ken Armstrong and Christian Sheckler,
“Why Are Cops around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?,”
ProPublica, 7 December 2019.
This is sufficient proof that many (most?) in the CIA, the FBI, and many police departments
are incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality,
and are entirely incapable of understanding evidence, and are certainly incapable of understanding grammar.
People end up in jail on bogus murder charges because of grammar?
This is where some of the 4.0’s end up.
Go figure.
Then there’s more:
David Corn summarizes in “William Barr’s War on Reality, Truth, and the Law,” Mother Jones, 10 December 2019:
“The FBI quickly concluded there were several points of possible contact between the Trump campaign and Russia that warranted scrutiny,
and they focused on Papadopoulos, Carter Page, another foreign policy adviser for the campaign, Paul Manafort,
then the campaign chairman, and Michael Flynn, a top national security adviser to Trump.”
Okay, fine.
Why did not the FBI investigate earlier?
These government officials were cozy with Russian oligarchs and the Russian propaganda machine, and so why did the FBI wait until 2016 to begin an investigation?
Manafort had for decades been starting wars.
He had been chief political strategist for Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt president of Ukraine, running what his assistant openly called a “shadow government.”
He invested millions for Russian oligarch/mobster Oleg Deripaska.
Why did the FBI wait until 2016 to begin an investigation?
Please explain. Somebody? Please?
Am I being fair?
No, I am not being fair.
Is there another side to the story?
Yes, there is another side to the story.
Here it is: Edward Herman,
“Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies:
The New York Times, 1917–2017,” Monthly Review, vol. 69 no. 3, 1 July 2017.
As you can see, this is not a matter of right and wrong.
This is a matter of wrong and wrong.
Humans... I’ve never understood humans.
The Russia story gets funnier:
“Meanwhile,
a Russian Spy Who Worked with Putin Is Now in Charge of US Embassy Security!” Daily Kos, 11 November 2017.
Not funny enough for you? Here’s the punch line: Julia Ioffe,
“The
Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks,” The Atlantic, 13 November 2017.
Not convinced? Here’s the topper:
Bill Buzenberg, “WikiLeaks
Set Off an Attack on Our Trump-Russia Project — Right after Messaging Donald Trump Jr. about It,”
Mother Jones, 15 November 2017.
The Senate voted to confirm Brian Benczkowski as head of the criminal division of the US Department of Justice.
Who is Brian Benczkowski?
Why, a legal representative of Vladimir Putin’s Alfa Bank, of course!
Difficile est saturam non scribere.
Is there more? Of course there’s more.
Here is the briefest chronology of what happened:
Mark Sumner, “What
Russia Did for Trump — A Stream of Stolen Documents Defined the Campaign,” Daily Kos, Friday, 8 December 2017.
Now that’s hilarious — unless you have a sense of humor.
So there is no question whatever that the election was stolen, and that the theft was performed in part by use of pilfered opposition strategy.
Brilliant.
Please scroll down to the comments until you find the lengthy one by wildblue,
time stamped “Dec 08 • 04:46:52 PM,”
which opens with the words, “Nice job Mark! There are a couple of things I do not understand....”
He took the words right out of my mouth, and added plenty I would never have thought of.
His comments are truly scary — unless, of course, you’re a fascist.
Another informative article is by James Risen, “Is Donald Trump a Traitor?” The Intercept, 16 February 2018.
Topping this off is an editorial by Julian Sánchez, “Russia Wanted Trump to Win. And It Wanted to Get Caught,”
The New York Times, 17 February 2018.
Sánchez may just be on to something.
Do you see the opportunity here that I see?
Let us now back up a few months.
Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence who has (had?) a sterling reputation with the FBI for providing fiercely accurate information,
wrote a series of memos about what Russians in the know were saying about Трамп.
Much, but not all, has been confirmed.
The Ritz Carlton story, though, I do not believe.
It supposedly took place in 2013 during the Miss Universe trip,
but there was not a moment for such hanky-panky.
If there was any such hanky-panky, it occurred at another time on another trip.
Yet I doubt it occurred at all, really.
That story seems to me to be a planted piece of disinformation, so that the Kremlin could trace any leaks.
That Трамп hired hookers, well, hey, you know.
What else would you expect?
(Happy Anniversary, Melania!
Keep on wearing that “I DON’T REALLY CARE DO U?” jacket as you visit imprisoned babies in concentration camps and do nothing to help.
What warmth you possess.
You couldn’t have married a better man.)
While the hooker claim is almost certainly true, the specific allegation fed to Steele was almost certainly false.
Happy reading!
As we can see, though informants are not named, there is enough identifying information to cause ructions.
That, in large part, is why these memos were kept secret.
It was BuzzFeed
that somehow
got hold of these memos and released them for all the world to see.
So it is BuzzFeed that must take responsibility for the following:
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...Five days after Trump’s inauguration, the
Russian business newspaper, Kommersant, published an
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More? More? You want more? Erin Burnett,
“Eight
Prominent Russians Dead Since US Elections,” CNN, 31 March 2017.
Think for a moment.
Who blabbed? Think. Just think.
Who knew who did what? Who had access to the top-secret intelligence?
Who was in a position to leak this info to the Russian government? Who?
This is from a movie called Our New President, by Maxim Pozdorovkin. Watching this pains me, because, I confess, I’ve always been rather fond of the Slavic peoples. This is not the behavior, this is not the vocabulary, this is not the attitude I want to believe could ever emanate from average Russians. Politicians, yes. Paid trolls, yes. FSB agents, yes. Not average Russians. Yet here it is. I don’t like to witness this. This is the direct result of mountains of propaganda. Propaganda is mind poison, and even small doses can be lethal. Also, if you’ve ever been impressed by RT, this movie will cure you of that, permanently.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin threatened to ban YouTube from Russia if this video were not removed. I almost feel sorry for some of the villains in this piece. For instance, the FSB hookers are almost tragic figures. They do not merely rent out their bodies, they discard their minds, they cultivate vindictiveness, and they force themselves to be phenomenally stupid (“Alex, one of us will find you and f*** you and post the video of it on the Internet. Because of you and those like you, people keep fighting wars now”). What fulfilling lives they lead. Note my wording: I almost feel sorry for them, because they are almost tragic figures. Anyway, basically all I know about Alekseĭ Navalnyĭ is this video. If I were to judge by this alone, my verdict is that I would vote for him in a heartbeat.
“Model with 2016 Secret Fights to Escape Russia, Oleg Deripaska’s Reach,” https://youtu.be/bQ5SFLHm9Fg
Here’s the
James Risen and others have been critiqued/attacked (crittacked) for using the word “treason” in describing this administration’s crimes.
Yes, by the strict constitutional definition, none of the crimes constitutes treason.
In all honesty, though, there is another way of looking at it, and there is nothing wrong with using the standard dictionary definition.
In response to an online article entitled
“Joe
Biden When He Saw The Intelligence: ‘If This Is True, It’s Treason” (Daily Kos, 13 March 2018),
a reader who goes by the moniker “kurious” posted a musing about the definition of treason:
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Yet what else does one call it ? when the President of the US:
Treason, by any other name, looks a lot like what Trump is doing:
From directly
revealing highly classified information to the Russians
(something that would be a violation of the Espionage Act, if mere mortals [anyone but Trump] did the same thing) —
to throwing a US ally under the bus to protect Putin, when Putin’s minions endanger civilians with a chemical attack on that ally’s soil.
Trump = America’s first Russian ‘president’.
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I can see one of the underlying problems. It screams out at me. The US, having witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and its vassal states, was overconfident. The enemy had been defeated, and the hero vindicated. Triumphalism was in the air — a triumphalism that resulted in the destruction of Yugoslavia and a war in Chechnya. The US has not learned its lesson: Triumphalism and overconfidence are fatal errors, quite literally fatal. The US demanded that the Commie lands instantly convert to Capitalism. Why? What difference does it make? The US should have demanded open societies rather than closed ones. Open and closed are the issues that matter. Rules concerning whether oligarchs should run industry rather than state officials is a different issue, which can and should be tabled until open societies are firmly established. An open society cannot last under rule either by state officials or by oligarchs, and that, I guess, is why the US never, under any circumstances, pushes for open societies. Yet, ironically, the US is basically an open society, but it is closing, little by little, and that worries me. So Russia, in two seconds flat, dumped its state resources into the laps of a handful of private billionaires. Did that really make a difference? So by losing the USSR, the Russians won the battle. The Трамп régime sided with the winner. That’s all. I have zero hope that the current administration will be curtailed in any of its activities, with or without Трамп/Pence; but even should I be proved wrong, the damage is done, for the current administration has reconfigured the federal courts, ensuring that the major global conglomerates will never lose, and that the rest of us will never win: Kate Harloe, “How Donald Trump Is Remaking the Federal Courts in His Own Image: The President’s Judicial Nominees Have Been Notably White, Male, and Conservative.,” Mother Jones, 9 November 2017. “White,” “Male,” and “Conservative” are not my main concerns. “On the take” is my main concern. Did you know that Supreme Court Justices are legally permitted to preside over cases in which they have conflicts of interest? I didn’t. What little I knew. Gorsuch, as we all know, is the tool of Koch Industries. It was the Koch brothers who got him into office, through machinations that in any other country would be illegal. Charles Koch is the
Another book came out recently, Timothy Snyder’s
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
(NY: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), and it has a wealth of information that I never knew or suspected, for instance (pp. 42–43):
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To find his successor, Yeltsin’s entourage organized a public opinion
poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was
Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted
into a number of films, most famously the television series Seventeen
Moments of Spring in 1973. The fictional Stierlitz was a Soviet plant in
German military intelligence during the Second World War, a communist
spy in Nazi uniform. Vladimir Putin, who had held a meaningless
post in the East German provinces during his career in the
KGB, was seen as the closest match to the fictional Stierlitz. Having
enriched himself as the assistant to the mayor of St. Petersburg in the
1990s, Putin was known to the Kremlin and thought to be a team
player. He had worked for Yeltsin in Moscow since 1998, chiefly as
head of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the former KGB). When
appointed Yeltsin’s prime minister in August 1999, Putin was unknown
to the larger public, so not a plausible candidate for national
elected office. His approval rating stood at 2%. And so it was time to
generate a crisis that he could appear to solve.
In September 1999, a series of bombs exploded in Russian cities,
killing hundreds of Russian citizens. It seemed possible that
the perpetrators were FSB officers. In the city of Ryazan, for example,
FSB officers were apprehended by their local colleagues as
suspects in the bombings. Though the possibility of
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So that’s what the world was dealing with.
Look at what the world is (not) dealing with now:
Morgan Wright, “Russia Is Already Warmed up for a Massive Attack on US Energy Grid,” The Hill, 16 March 2018.
Read that. Read that carefully. It’s coming.
Surely one reason that our politicians are playing along with the Kremlin and doing so little to prevent the attack is that any attempt at prevention will pull the trigger.
For heaven’s sake, why are our electrical grids, why are our nuclear reactors, why are our gas systems, why are our water systems connected to the Internet?
Purest suicidal idiocy.
Who was dumb enough to do that? To permit it? Not to prosecute it? Who? I want to know!
Utilities need to be taken off the Internet — now. Yesterday.
Returning to news of home, the bigger issue is that, even removing Russia from the mix, the US was primed for the election insanity already.
If we in the US were sensible beings, the idiocies of the past half century would never have happened.
If we in the US were sensible beings, Russia would never have gotten a foothold here.
As it was, even had Russia done absolutely nothing, the election results would have been the same,
because the hanky-panky had already been set into motion by US operatives.
The Russians simply piggy-backed onto what was already created right here.
Can we simply vote these ogres out of office? Not so likely.
Alan Grayson sent out an intriguing mass email recently, which makes for sobering reading.
(In brackets I inserted four words that were quite obviously dropped in error.)
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Subject: It’s rigged. But not the way you think.
From: Alan Grayson <alangrayson@graysonforcongress.com> Date: Sun, Dec 03, 2017 1:15 pm
The system is rigged, because [just to break even,] Democrats need more votes than Republicans do.
Seriously.
In two of the last five Presidential elections, the Democrat won the popular vote, and lost the election.
(In fact, the last time that any Presidential candidate, winner or loser, won more than 53% of the vote was in 1984.)
The explanations for winning the popular vote and losing the electoral vote don’t end with the “butterfly ballot,” or “Pizzagate.”
What would happen if the Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates received exactly the same number of votes, nationwide?
Very likely, the Republican would win.
The Cook Political Report’s “Partisan Voting Index” (PVI) measures how states and congressional districts vote differently from the nation as a whole,
based on the last two Presidential elections.
The “blue” states are “D+”; the “red” states are “R+”; the “purple” states are “even.”
If a state has a
Thanks to the GOP’s domination of small states, there are 27 R+ states, 20 D+ states, and three that are even.
The R+ states give the Republicans 262 electoral votes, just eight short of a win, while the D+ states give the Democrats only 242 electoral votes.
Among the three even states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Hampshire,
the Republican wins with either Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, while the Democrats have to win both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Advantage: GOP.
In the Senate, the small states and the large states each have two votes.
There is one Senator for every 300,000 Wyomingites, and one Senator for every 20,000,000 Californians.
The fact that there are 27 R+ states and only 20 D+ states means that if the national votes are even,
there would be something like 57 Republican Senators and only 43 Democratic Senators.
The GOP’s advantage in the smaller states puts them close to a filibuster-proof majority, when the national vote is even.
To get to a
Advantage: GOP.
In the House, gerrymandering gives the GOP a huge advantage.
The GOP’s control of many state governments has allowed it to “pack” Democrats into a small number of Congressional districts,
while spreading a solid majority of Republicans (usually 57% to 43%) in numerous districts.
That’s why the Pennsylvania delegation, an “even” state, is
Nationwide, there are 238 R+ House seats, eight even seats, and only 189 D+ seats.
(Republicans hold only eight D+ seats, and Democrats hold only nine R+ seats.)
218 seats make a majority.
The Democrats would have to win every D+ seat; every even seat;
every
Advantage: GOP.
So the system is, in fact, rigged against the Democrats.
We need more votes than they do, just to break even.
How can we possibly make that happen?
Turnout.
Only 22% of Hispanics are Republicans. But last year, only 48% of Hispanics voted.
Only 33% of voters under the age of 25 are Republicans. But last year, only 43% of those young voters voted.
We have to get more Democrats to vote. When Democrats vote, Democrats win.
Courage,
Alan Grayson
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Alan made a mistake: In THREE of the last five Presidential elections, the Democrat won the popular vote, and lost the election. 2000, 2004, 2016.
Putting the Трамп story together is not easy. Трамп is an illiterate and often incoherent stooge being used by all manner of criminals. Let’s do just a tiny bit of shallow digging on the Internet. Hmmmm. We find some fascinating stories, don’t we?
• |
Michael Lewis, “Why
the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House,” Vanity Fair, 26 July 2017.
Don’t read this one just before going to sleep.
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• |
Michael Gross, “Inside
Donald Trump’s One-Stop Parties: Attendees Recall Cocaine and Very Young Models,” The Daily Beast, 24 October 2016.
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• |
“‘We
All Knew About the Trafficking’ — The Untold Story of Trump Model Management (Part 1),” Daily Kos, 6 October 2016.
(Unfortunately, there was never a Part 2.)
| |
• |
“October
Surprises: Trump’s Child Sex Trafficking Is Finally Becoming a Major Story (Update),” Daily Kos, 25 October 2016.
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• |
Carole Cadwalladr, “Robert
Mercer: The Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media,” The Guardian, Sunday, 26 February 2017.
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• |
Jane Mayer, “The
Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon behind the Trump Presidency,” The New Yorker, 27 March 2017.
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Compare and contrast the above two articles with the one below: | ||
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Steven Bertoni, “Exclusive
Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump the White House,” Forbes, 22 November 2016.
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There are not many countries in the world in which articles such as the above could ever see the light of day. We are lucky that we are living in one of the few that allows dissent, though only within officially permissible limits, limits set by corporate executives and their political-donation departments. Unfortunately, few people would pay any attention to such investigations, as they are more interested in staring endlessly at their Smartphones while ruining their hearing with ear buds. That is a deliberate strategy, you know. Once people are addicted to nonsense, they are neutralized. (Just saw this at the book shop: Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked [London: Bodley Head, 2018; NY: Penguin, 2018]. Another item to add to my endless queue.) Anyway, with the proposed end of net neutrality, stories such as these will seldom be published anymore, anywhere. Now, think again about Carole Cadwalladr’s article on Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica. It’s a marvelous article, but it only goes so far. There’s a deeper problem here. | ||
• |
Robert Epstein, “The New Mind Control,”
Aeon, 18 February 2016.
| |
Had you thought of that? Even if you hadn’t, I had. My web site is purely a vanity project. I sell nothing here. I merely offer my scribblings as a free public service, to help others with their research, that’s all. I enjoy sharing my discoveries. Despite my modest ambition, I do have some | ||
Intertwined with this thought control is the technology that makes it possible.
As I walk down the streets, travel in buses, and ride on commuter trains, I witness the new addiction.
It is now rare to see somebody without buds in the ears and a Smartphone in the hand, with eyes affixed and finger scrolling.
Where did this addiction come from? Why is this new toy so addicting? | ||
• |
Paul Lewis, “‘Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’:
The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia,”
The Guardian, 6 October 2017.
| |
With this new technology we feel perpetually connnected with the world at large. This interconnectedness is not interconnectedness. It is brainwashing. Our “friends” are not friends; they are letters on a screen. The ideas and opinions of these “friends” are naught more than regurgitations of propaganda, much of it planted by trolls. The advertisements and links are | ||
• |
“I Was a Paid Internet Shill,”
Conscious Life News, 2012.
| |
Let’s get back to Russia. This next one will scare you half to death: | ||
• |
Russ Baker, C. Collins, and Jonathan Z. Larsen, “Why
FBI Can’t Tell All on Trump, Russia,” Who.What.Why., 27 March 2017. | |
So we are stuck with this. Investigations will do next to nothing. At best, investigations will produce only cosmetic results. The USA is definitively over. | ||
NOTE ADDED ON 30 MARCH 2019: See? Just like I said. The investigations did next to nothing.
Those on the R side of the aisle are now luxuriating in their victory, smug in what they choose to perceive as the vindication of Трамп.
Bob Mueller’s final report remains a mystery.
Even the parameters of his investigation remain a mystery.
All we have is
a brief summary by Трамп’s hired hand, Bill Barr, who was put into his position specifically to make this investigation go away.
Barr has promised to publish a censored version of the report.
Whoopeedoopeedoo ho hum.
Upon delivery of Barr’s summary,
Alabama Republican representative Morris Jackson “Mo” Brooks took the floor to deride Democrats as purveyors of the Big Lie,
and read from Mein Kampf to compare current Democrats with the Jews that Hitler was railing against for their alleged “Big Lies.”
The Democrats’ Big Lie?
The Big Lie that Трамп had colluded with Russia, of course.
Brooks then smeared Democrats as “Socialists” as in Nazi “National Socialists.”
Will Brooks be censured? Fat chance.
Will Brooks be committed to a lunatic asylum?
Fat chance.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, bless her heart, publicly referred to Brooks’s performance as
“repulsive.”
One of my worries — not a big worry, but a worry — was what the Mueller team’s final report would say, and what it would omit.
As good as Mueller is, and yes, he is good, he is also problematic, as Susan Lindauer explained back in 2011.
As a response to the “vindication” of Трамп,
Republicans demanded that Adam Schiff resign from the House Select Intelligence Committee for his allegations of Трамп/Russia collusion.
Though I’m not a Schiff fan (he voted in favor of the war against Iraq and the war against Yemen), I do admire his response, given to the House Select Intelligence Committee
on Thursday, 28 March 2019:
| ||
|
Will Schiff’s words make the tiniest bit of difference?
No.
People who side with Трамп, side with Трамп.
People who don’t, don’t.
The Трампophiles accept Bill Barr’s letter as total vindication,
which, retroactively, makes everything else a Big Lie.
With Barr’s
| ||
• |
“Donald Trump’s Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs Exposed,” USA News, 2017.
| |
• |
Susan Grigsby,
“God, Guns... and Russia?”
Daily Kos, 8 October 2017.
| |
Does that puzzle you? The Russian Orthodox Church is not a monolith. There are schisms. The largest faction, though, is the | ||
• |
Heather Digby Parton,
“Trump,
the | |
Do not expect this marriage of the Orthodox Church and the Evangelical right to end well. The divorce will be nasty, there will be clashes, they will be violent, and the rest of us will be collateral damage. | ||
Now for one of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen: | ||
• |
“BOMBSHELL:
Trump’s Been Laundering Russian Mob Money For Decades, Allegedly,” The Young Turks, 24 July 2017.
| |
Then comes the article that contradicts the Russian story: | ||
• |
Patrick Lawrence, “U.S.
Intelligence Veterans Believe the ‘Russian Hack’ of DNC Computers May Have Been an Inside Job,” Truth Dig, 24 July 2017.
| |
Maybe. The report by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is far from definitive, and it makes assumptions that are almost certainly invalid. Even Wikipedia explains this clearly. What if VIPS is correct, though? What if? If so, the story gets worse: | ||
• |
||
If that’s true, then we have a Teflon Don, created in part by his adversaries. Great.
| ||
Of course, there is no solid proof of the Russian hacking of the US election.
John Pilger, who bizarrely insists upon the “proof” of Clinton’s collusion with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to create and support ISIS,
continues to emphasize the absence of any proof in the Трамп/Russia scandal.
Others, mostly on the extreme right, do the same.
Pilger is wrong, for there is no proof of the Clinton/ISIS claim, nor is there even any good evidence.
As a matter of fact, the cited evidence actually demonstrates the exact opposite!
Pilger is correct, though, that we have no proof regarding Трамп’s collusion with Russia in tampering with the election.
Nonetheless, we do have good evidence, and we also have circumstantial evidence.
Let us examine the weakest of these three categories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_syEPp28oY
When you watch this on YouTube,
you can see the work of the trolls and astroturfers in the comments underneath.
At the beginning of this essay, I pointed out what others have pointed out:
Our foreign policy is now for sale.
The Трамп administration conducts foreign policy in order to benefit Трамп’s personal investments.
That is why he is now making nice with proven enemies and being hostile towards proven allies.
Why were we surprised (why was I surprised) when it was announced that it was not only Russia that helped Трамп win the election?
It was also Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and at least one Israeli.
Why was this a suprise?
Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and David D. Kirkpatrick,
“Trump Jr.
and Other Aides Met With Gulf Emissary Offering Help to Win Election,”
The New York Times, 19 May 2018.
Now do we understand why Трамп had the US withdraw from the Iran nuclear treaty?
Трамп had the US withdraw as a favor to the Saudi and UAE royals.
Does that make you feel comfortable?
Will the story end with Russia/ Arabia/ UAE/ Israel?
I doubt it. We shall discover more ingredients in this stew’s secret recipe.
As you all know, ZTE is spying on the US.
Tara Francis Chan, “The FBI Is ‘Deeply Concerned’ about Espionage from Companies
Like Chinese Tech Giant ZTE as Trump Tries to Lift Sanctions on Them,” Business Insider, 16 May 2018.
The Senate, in one of its few brief moments of sanity, put a stop to this nonsense.
The House, in one of its continual bouts of lunacy, then reversed the Senate’s legislation.
I’ve been on this planet for more than a half-century now,
and I can assure you that it was not until the current administration that the news
was ever an unending stream of captivating entertainment.
As you all know, since it has been the headline of every newspaper every day for several years now,
the US purchases some of its military weaponry from China.
John Shiffman, Andrea Shalal-Esa,
“Exclusive: U.S. Waived Laws to Keep F-35 on Track with China-Made Parts,” Reuters, 3 January 2014.
This has been reported constantly since 2010 if not earlier.
Did you notice? Or were you too busy paying attention to the stories about Angelina Jolie’s weight problems?
The US purchases military weaponry from a country that is conducting espionage on the US military.
Ooooo this makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
That was a pretty good punch line, wasn’t it?
A good punch line is always followed by a topper.
Cristina Maza, “U.S. Military Is Running Out of Bombs,”
Newsweek, 23 May 2018.
Get it? Get it? Get it?
No? We’re running out of bombs because we purchase the ingredients from China, which suddenly finds that it can no longer supply us.
Get it now?
That’s a real knee-slapper.
Remember, China supports North Korea.
Because I have a suspicious mind, I am putting two and two together, and I don’t think my result is seven.
The Трамп administration is doing everything in its power to pit us all against one another: immigrant-native-black-white-and-whatnot.
The Трамп administration is doing everything in its power to allow anyone and everyone to purchase guns and automatic weapons for the asking.
The Трамп administration is doing everything in its power to eliminate safety and health laws.
The Трамп administration is doing everything in its power to slash or eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and probably retirement as well.
My deeply suspicious mind detects a pattern here.
My deeply suspicious mind concludes that the Трамп administration wants this country to degenerate into a bloodbath.
None of the above goals, of course, is anything new.
These attempts have been continuous, and they shall continue even if the Трамп administration magically vanishes in a puff of smoke tonight.
Yet it’s all so blatant now, so terribly blatant, so terribly concentrated, so terribly focused.
Now we’s in the middle of a prolonged federal shutdown.
Why?
Трамп says we are in a shutdown until he gets his Wall.
What a load of rot.
We are in a shutdown for a different reason.
If the shutdown lasts long enough, federal employees will run out of the money they’ve been putting aside for a rainy day.
If the shutdown lasts long enough, there will be no federal staff to check on food safety, airplane safety, or security.
Somebody’s gonna have a ball, and there’s going to be lots of bloodshed.
Just what Трамп wants.
Besides, the bane of Трамп’s existence is the intelligence community,
and if the shutdown had lasted long enough, there would have been no more intelligence community.
Now Трамп is threatening to reinstate the shutdown.
Then amazing things happened.
After Трамп demanded that the US
surrender to ISIS and the Taliban,
leaving the Kurds in the lurch, once again,
ISIS lost its principal territory.
Yet ISIS is not gone, and it will regroup, and it remains lethal.
At about the same time, against all expectation, a new Congress was voted into power.
There were sufficient votes to overcome the suppression and gerrymandering, which means that the true result must have been a landslide.
Was I happy about this?
No. Why? Because I knew things would go wrong.
Establishment Democrats are to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party is to the Republican Party.
New representative Ilhan Omar
tweeted a truth about AIPAC, and the Democrats, predictably, censured her and demanded an apology,
which, to my tremendous disappointment, she delivered.
I wish she had stood her ground.
Once again, as ever, a criticism of Israel’s policies and Israeli lobbying is misreported as anti-Semitism.
In my personal view, Israel’s policies and Israeli lobbying are anti-Semitic ,
and criticisms of those policies and of that lobbying should be seen as philo-Semitic.
I am grateful that
Jewish Voice for Peace recognizes that Rep. Omar is an ally, not an enemy,
and that they are offering her support.
So, think about it: Prominent Jewish activists endorse Rep. Omar,
while Establishment Democrats chastise her for “anti-Semitism.”
What is going on?
The Establishment Democrats and the Tea Party seem to me to be gunning for Reps. Omar and Tlaib,
hoping to make examples of them.
If they succeed, we’re in even more trouble.
Here is
Ilhan Omar.
I generally dislike politicians. I’m beginning to make one of my rare exceptions here.
Put it all together and you begin to wonder, don’t you?
President.... President.... Forty percent approval rating....
62,979,636 US citizens who support mob violence....
This means that the US will no longer be a superpower.
This means that the US economy will collapse.
Nobody’s going to weep for us.
It’s tragic that some 300,000,000 innocent people will need to suffer for this.
|
UA TRUMP-UKRAINE. Putin allies in Ukraine launder Trump campaign donations via shady Trump associates and provide fake dirt on Biden
in exchange for Trump’s help returning Ukraine’s energy industry to Kremlin control. Side deals to keep Manafort quiet, aid Putin’s war in Ukraine.
CN TRUMP-CHINA. In exchange for business deals, lucrative trademarks, fake Biden dirt, and PR from a trade deal,
Trump agrees to ignore early intel on an emerging virus in China and stay silent on human rights abuses.
Public and private comments establish a historic quid pro quo.
VE TRUMP-VENEZUELA. While pretending to support regime change, Trump secretly bolsters Venezuela’s
RU TRUMP-RUSSIA. Trump secretly negotiates Russian business deals while promising Putin the most
SA TRUMP-SAUDI ARABIA. Trump receives Saudi financing for a
AE TRUMP-UAE. Trump receives Emirati financing for
IL TRUMP-ISRAEL. Longtime Trump family friend and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifts Trump
an illegal
TR TRUMP-TURKEY. Trump secretly aids Turkish president Erdogan in three federal cases to preserve his business interests in Turkey,
which Erdogan has threatened. He later
IR TRUMP-IRAN. Trump scuttles successful nuclear deal with Iran to pave the way for a war he’s promised Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel.
Agrees to assassinate
KP TRUMP-NORTH KOREA. Trump spends years exchanging insipid “love letters ”with North Korea’s brutal dictator
while putting photo ops over policy, knowing that the result of doing so will be a nuclearized rogue state
capable of reaching America’s West Coast with nuclear warheads.
IE🏴 TRUMP-IRELAND/TRUMP-SCOTLAND. Despite most
QA TRUMP-QATAR. Trump receives illegal foreign donations to his inaugural fund from Qatar,
later abandoning the U.S. ally to its fate when nations with whom he has a stronger quid pro quo —
Saudi Arabia and the UAE — announce they want to blockade and possibly overrun their neighbor.
EU TRUMP-EU. Trump spends years lying about and trying to destroy the EU and NATO as part of a campaign to please Putin —
whose chief political ambition is the destruction of the EU and NATO —
to no benefit to the U.S. but great benefit to Trump’s future business prospects in Moscow.
SV TRUMP-SYRIA. Trump abandons Syria to Russia and ISIS to please Putin and Erdogan.
U.S. influence in the Middle East collapses; ISIS is revived; U.S. troops are forced to ignominiously flee from the country —
under Turkish fire! — and abandon both ISIS prisoners and Kurdish allies.
INEG TRUMP-INDIA/TRUMP-EGYPT. In nations where he hopes to one day do business,
Trump supports murderous, bigoted autocrats hostile to both freedom of the press and persecuted minorities.
Trump’s support props up regimes that endanger regional stability and global human rights.
AF TRUMP-AFGHANISTAN. Having said he wants the US out of Afghanistan; having spread Kremlin propaganda on Afghan history;
having made clear he thinks leaving Afghanistan aids his reelection; Trump is silent on a Kremlin assassination plot aimed at driving the US from Afghanistan.
TW TRUMP-TAIWAN. As he’s seeking to do business in Taiwan,
PH TRUMP-PHILIPPINES. After receiving a public endorsement from Filipino autocrat/madman Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 —
despite opining that foreign endorsements (if Democrats receive them) are collusion —
Trump supports Duterte’s policy of using the death penalty for nonviolent offenses.
HNSVGT TRUMP-HONDURAS, TRUMP-EL SALVADOR, TRUMP-GUATEMALA. Trump effectively sentences Central American refugees
to a violent death in their home countries by stealing DoD funds to build a useless border wall and decimating US asylum policy.
Puts kids in cages; some of them die.
US TRUMP-COVID19. Trump criminally mismanages one of the worst public health crises in American history —
a killer transnational pandemic — doing so to protect himself politically. His malfeasance, nonfeasance,
and thousands of lies are provably linked to over 100,000 US deaths.
|
WHAT THEY NEVER TEACH IN SCHOOL
Take a look at this little video.
(Sorry. I tried to embed the videos on this page, but that slowed everything down to a snail’s pace.
So just click on the links.)
“ALL U.S. Presidents Except One Related to One British King,” BridgeAnne d’Avignon.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
Has this tradition ended with the current “outsider” executive? I hardly think so.
Judy Kurtz, “Trump, Hillary Are Distant Relatives, Experts Say,” The Hill, 25 August 2015.
Is BridgeAnne d’Avignon’s research correct? I’d be surprised if it isn’t.
If this were true of another country, we would call that country an oligarchy.
Since this is our own country, we call ourselves a democracy.
In a democracy, citizens fashion their own government policies.
When is the last time you remember participating in the fashioning of your own government policies?
Now, don’t worry. I’m not one of these crazies who rants about how “the globalists” and the “Illuminati”
are crushing our precious democracy by means of the CFR and whatnot.
Yet I’m sure most people would classify me as one such crazy.
Granted, there are more wacko ideas about how the world works than you or I would ever be able to tally.
That phenomenon works to the advantage of propagandists.
You see, in response to the crazies, many supposedly sober and responsible people (for instance, university history professors)
tell us to disbelieve all ideas about how the world works, except, of course, for those issued from official channels.
Oh how I loved it when those history professors argued, endlessly,
that history can be written only by trained historians with Ph.D.’s,
and that anyone else, including actual participants and eyewitnesses, should be dismissed out of hand.
Rather than pay attention to our history professors,
we should, instead, take heed of the old oft-cited anonymous saying,
“Never believe anything
until it has been officially denied.”
To my surprise, I’ve discovered that these past two decades or so have seen
the independent production of small videos that explain the basics.
Hope you’re open to viewing and evaluating them.
History and PolSci profs will dismiss all of this as gullibility and naïveté,
and will argue that politicians are sincere in their desire to help us.
That got a huge laugh in my US Diplomacy class way back in the autumn of 1980.
That raucous reaction prompted the prof to convince us all that he was right and that we were wrong for being so cynical.
It worked. He convinced us all. I’m ashamed that I too fell for his packs of lies.
Most other people, I have learned, will angrily dismiss the below information out of hand
and put it down to the ravings of the tin-foil-hat crowd. Meh.
Naomi Klein, “The Worst Is Yet to Come with Trump, So We Must Be Ready for Shock Politics,”
Democracy Now! 30 June 2017.
She’s my nominee for Person of the Century.
When this video disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
Naomi Wolf, “The End of America,”
Kane Hall, University of Washington–Seattle, 11 October 2007.
When YouTube deletes this,
Here’s the other wonderful Naomi.
She was justifiably worried that we were well on the road to dictatorship in 2007, or at least martial law.
I had the exact same fear, and I was predicting martial law between the November 2008 election and the January 2009 inauguration.
Thank heaven I was wrong!
She wrote a marvelous book,
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007),
which I recommend in the strongest terms.
Fortunately for us all, the pattern didn’t play out according to the script.
Apparently the US is too large and too amorphous to close down so quickly.
Despite voter suppression and rigging, Obama’s numbers so overwhelmed the scheming that he prevailed anyway.
True, Obama was no angel, and his administration did little to reverse the Bush administration’s infrastructure,
and actually made some of it much worse,
but his administration was nonetheless a damper on the Crazies’ plans.
Everything Naomi detailed in her book is still part of our current reality.
She updated her work during the Obama years:
Naomi Wolf, “The End of America — Revisited,”
New Hampshire Liberty Forum.
When YouTube deletes this,
This talk is even better than the previous one.
It’s cathartic for me to hear someone else express some of my own suspicions about shadow government and political theatre.
Rather odd to see Naomi talking to libertarians, for she is certainly not a libertarian herself.
Everybody that night was open to different ideas, though.
This talk was given just before it became clear that Assange was a nutcase.
“Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent,” National Film Board of Canada, 1992.
When right-wingers see and listen to Noam, what they see is an angry old grouch consumed with hatred.
That’s not what I see at all.
When this video disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
H. Bruce Franklin, “How the Fascists Won World War II,” Counterpunch, 6 August 2020.
I’ve been wondering about this for decades. I still do not understand.
“Four Horsemen — Feature Documentary - Official Version,” Renegade, Inc..
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
“Koch Brothers EXPOSED,” Brave New Films.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
“The Century of the Self,” Adam Curtis.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
“The Power of Nightmares, Part One,” Adam Curtis.
When it disappears from DailyMotion, right-click and save-as here.
“The Power of Nightmares, Part Two,” Adam Curtis.
When it disappears from DailyMotion, right-click and save-as here.
“The Power of Nightmares, Part Three,” Adam Curtis.
When it disappears from DailyMotion, right-click and save-as here.
“9/11 — The Anatomy of a Great Deception,” David Hooper.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
“Immigrants for Sale,” Brave New Films.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
“CIA Analyst Discusses the Assassination of Edward Snowden,” WHDT 9.
I entirely distrust Snowden, and now I’ve become uneasy about McGovern. So what should I do?
Still worth watching, though.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
“The Real Agenda of the American Empire,” Ray McGovern.
You can skip ahead to 46:04.
When I first saw this, I loved it; now I have misgivings, but it’s still worth watching.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and
“The Secret History of the American Empire,” John Perkins.
When it disappears from YouTube, right-click and save-as here.
Oh this could go on and on and on.
Thanks to the free use of the Internet, which I predict will soon be taken away from us,
we now have access to mountains of information that previously would have been either entirely unobtainable
or available but only with great difficulty, and only if we knew to look for it.
Now, these past twenty years or so, much information is just a browser search and a click away.
This still amazes me. It is a hopelessly unreal childhood fantasy made fact.
There’s plenty more. Keep searching.
Be careful, of course. Often what seems most credible is actually manufactured.
The opposite is similarly the case, as what seems most incredible is sometimes true.
It is impossible at first glance to tell the difference, and our college professors are paid to lead us astray.
Be even more careful, because truth and propaganda get mixed, sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally.
One of the videos above, and I won’t tell you which one,
interviews an authority, whom I shall not name, who is actually a disinformation specialist,
and in the video he provides data that are misleadingly fractional.
One of my favorite journalists, who is in one of the videos above,
has also willingly submitted to an interview, at least once, by Alex Jones,
and surprisingly he didn’t seem to understand that he had just been used.
So what do we make of all this?
Having witnessed the mainstream news media in action, I saw firsthand that news is their least concern.
The concern is spin, which is what advertisers like.
Perhaps I’m a cynic (I’ve been accused of being such), but even I was shocked by the mindless cynicism of many journalists
who just took it as read that anyone and everyone they were interviewing had an ulterior motive, had an angle, and was trying to peddle something.
The thought that maybe some of their interviewees might simply have been telling the truth never occurred to them.
That’s the sort of cynicism that nullified any value in reporting.
When we add all this together,
the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that the news media are designed only to misreport and to make money.
As for our oligarchy, my conclusion, which is open to modification should better information be forthcoming,
is that nearly all politicians in the UK and US and probably some other countries too are billionaire members of the same extended family
who all belong to the same secretive clubs and lodges,
and who are all in bed with the world’s financial interests as well as with various international criminal syndicates.
Read Jeff Sharlet’s book,
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,
and if that doesn’t ruin your sleep, nothing will.
It might interest you to take a look at this emblem.
Then if you notice a similarity with
this other emblem
that just proves you have a suspicious mind, that’s all.
Currently Arizona just has just suppressed a vote.
This is nothing new.
This has been going on since before I was born.
My conclusion, which is not so open to modification,
is that our supposedly free elections just give us the choice of which member of this élite family
we wish to have as our country’s hood ornament.
Further, our choice doesn’t matter.
If, despite voter suppression and police blockades preventing people of darker complexions from reaching their polling places,
the vote still goes against the wishes of the financial interests, they’ll change it.
All elections in the US are driven by campaign contributions, which in any other country would be called bribes.
“Liberal” and “conservative” administrations alike commit war crimes
and kidnap refugees to fly them back to their executioners.
Flagrant warmongers and human-rights violators Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama were given Nobel Peace Prizes,
in consequence of which all other Laureates should (but don’t) return their awards.
Hollywood entertainment consistently makes the point that the indigenous peoples of the US are white Europeans.
(The rare exceptions do little or nothing to illustrate the truth, but provide yet another comforting fantasy.)
Hollywood has further conditioned us to worship the rich.
Our heroes and idols are movie stars and sports stars and rock stars and TV stars who earn more in a month
than any of the rest of us will earn in a lifetime.
In that irreal milieu, such TV shows as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous were hits,
convincing us that we shall soon have our day too.
That’s totally delusional. We shall not have our day, ever, and we shall never be allowed to.
The billionaires grab up all the money without putting it back into the economy, driving us all into poverty and debt,
and we celebrate them for it. We love them for it. We worship them for it.
The billionaires then convince us that our money troubles
are all the fault of refugees or welfare recipients or illegal immigrants
(we are the illegal immigrants, not the Méxicans and American Indians we are arresting and deporting)
or Muslims or Commies or environmentalists or whomever,
and that in response we must go to war against country after country after country
to rid the world of such terrorists as ISIL which was largely a US creation to begin with.
It should come as no surprise that assaults are now becoming commonplace at presidential spectacles,
with the victims being arrested while the perpetrators are cheered.
People generally mock me when I say that indigenous peoples such as the American Indians
had what were, despite their innumerable faults, societies that were superior to ours,
in large part because nobody surrendered decision-making duties to leaders
and also in large part because everybody participated in every aspect of life.
People mock me even more when I further conclude that civilization is the root cause of all our ills.
Thanks to civilization and its sibling, industrialism,
we are nearly out of fossil fuels, nearly all the world’s water has been poisoned,
and industry-induced climate shift is causing crops to fail.
If by some miracle we are not extinct by the year 2050,
then the few survivors will not have any of the luxuries we take for granted.
Without industrialized farming, there won’t be enough food to go around to feed even a hundredth of us.
Central heating, thermostats, refrigeration, long-distance transport of food,
household electricity, automobiles, airplanes — kiss them all goodbye.
Water filtration? Gone.
Running water from our faucets? A thing of the past.
Flush toilets? It will be absurd to think such things could ever have existed.
Our leaders (owners, really) know that we’d start a revolution if deprived of gas, oil, and electricity.
To prevent that, they give us gas, oil, and electricity, no matter what the consequences.
The price to them is reasonable: We’re all going to die of thirst and starvation — very soon.
Without water and food, we cannot stage a revolution. That’s a much preferable result, they think.
I like what I heard John Trudell say one evening to an audience mostly of whites:
“You’re the new Indians! They don’t need you anymore!” He was right.
It will be interesting (interesting?) to see how many intelligent and educated people
fall for the upcoming “news” stories about the new evil empires.
Will there be another incident? Probably.
Solution to these world probs? Well, it’s not something that one can do on one’s own.
It would take a massive group effort: Get off the monetary system.
There’s no such thing as “clean money.”
Let’s just abandon the stuff altogether.
It would take millions of us acting in concert, though, to do that.
I wanted to add a few more videos to the above collection.
For instance, about ten years ago a Gore Vidal fan sent me a video by Bill Still called The Money Masters.
I’m not an economist, but what I saw seemed well-argued and accurate, and I was deeply impressed.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I never in a hundred lifetimes would have expected to see what I just saw or to hear what I just heard
coming from Bill Still’s mouth.
You see, he supports Alex Jones and Donald Trump. Say what????
So that settles it.
Everything Bill Still said was wrong.
That further proves how naïve I am. I fell for this stupid video.
I bet lots of people would laugh at my stupidity, because they saw this coming from miles away.
As I sift through his web site and sample the comments from his followers, I get the chills.
I bumped into another video, too, that seemed exceptionally promising,
about the way the mass media manipulate not only our opinions, but our minds, our tastes, our consciences,
about how the mass media are reshaping us into being something no longer quite human.
Intelligent, perceptive, engrossing. I was quite excited when I started watching it. It was a genuine discovery.
Then, just a few minutes in, it condemned homosexuality as a perversion that results from this media conditioning.
What? Are these people totally insane? Yes, they are.
Getting back to our oligarchy, our extended international royal family, there are admittedly a few nice members of it.
I met and interviewed one, a rather famous one,
who had no love of the status quo and wished to see it all burn to the ground, though he didn’t exactly say so.
Instead of propping up the guys in power, he was the spokesperson for those most in need
and he quite secretly and anonymously donated to progressive charities,
though he mysteriously chose never to make friends with those in need, those at the bottom of the pyramid.
I suppose he was just too painfully shy and awkward and frightened and fragile
to endure the thought of socializing in unfamiliar circles.
At the time I didn’t completely understand why he was so emotionally unstable and why he was an alcoholic. Now I know.
Any sensitive person growing up in that horrid milieu would inevitably become emotionally unstable.
Those who thrive in that milieu —
the Cheneys and Clintons and Bushes and Obamas and Carters and so forth —
are such disturbed people with such deformed minds that they can be considered human only physically.
Perhaps they are simply so inbred that their brains atrophied in the womb.
Some of them (G.W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio,
Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, for instance)
certainly look retarded and even maniacal,
though I’m in no position to determine if they actually are.
No matter; they are unquestionably bizarre and devoid of the most elemental human sympathies.
Why does nobody state the obvious?
(Sanders looks human, but don’t be fooled.
Egad.)
If these people were not famous or politically connected, and if they wandered into a meeting,
we would gently escort them out of the room and then secure the door shut.
Yet because they are famous and politically connected, we take them seriously
and accept that they can be our leaders and make our decisions for us. Why?
There’s some guy on YouTube who calls himself “Reich-Wing Watch”
and who styles himself a libertarian-socialist.
I assume that means he basically agrees with Noam Chomsky.
He has done some nice videos, and I hope he continues to do so.
He opens by hosting a commercial created by someone/s called “Citizens SuperPAC”:
“Heil Trump: A Warning to America”
When YouTube deletes this, download it.
“Hillary Clinton: Republican for President”
When YouTube deletes this, download it.
“Donald Trump: Make America Hate Again”
When YouTube deletes this, download it.
“Donald Trump’s AmeriKKKa: His Craziest, Most Racist Supporters”
When YouTube deletes this, download it.
Comedy writers and satyrists, here’s your material.
How many you could invent such a rich lode of surrealism?
“Alex Jones and the Rise of the Fourth Reich”
When YouTube deletes this, download it.
Yup. YouTube took it down,
I suppose because the exposé dealt with topics so repulsive that they could not even be presented as an exposé.
|
When I first saw this guy on the Internet, years ago, I was confused.
He looked mad as a hatter, and he acted mad as a hatter, and yet once in a blue moon some of his reporting was exemplary.
I purchased a few of his videos, and, to my surprise, they were good.
Something was wrong, though.
The majority of his reporting, as I witnessed on the Internet, was just the psychotic ravings of a madman,
with perhaps his most egregiously offensive “scoop” being that the
Newtown shooting was a hoax.
Something was up, but what? Now I pretty much know.
I now further know that one no longer need break in via the mainstream in order to get a cult following.
To get a cult following, all one need do is purchase a web domain, build a little video studio, and rant like a madman.
Credibility is greatly enhanced if the ranting madman can induce respectable journalists (Greg Palast, for instance) to be interviewed on his show.
Many respectable journalists will do so, because they haven’t seen the ranting madman’s show
and so they just innocently assume that one interview is as good as another. Wrong!
Oh, one point I should make: Fifteen years ago or so, Jones occasionally made reasonable comments.
Then, suddenly, he gave that up and aligned himself with the worst extremists.
Apparently, he found somebody who pays better. My question: Who?
I should point out something else as well.
Many of us have legitimate concerns that some of the news stories that trickle down to us are not reliable, and are in fact propaganda.
I have seen a little behind-the-scenes among journalists, and I have learned not to trust their reporting.
I have also dabbled in local history, and the process of investigating those old newspaper stories will cause anybody’s opinion of journalism to take a nosedive.
So that you can all see clearly what a deluded maniac I am, I confess:
I do not believe the official reports about the incident at the Gulf of Tonkin
(see Lieutenant Commander Pat Paterson, “The Truth About Tonkin,”
Naval History Magazine vol. 22 no. 1, February 2008).
Speaking for myself, I am not convinced that 9/11 was the work of 19 Saudis with boxcutters, I am not convinced that bin Laden had anything to do with it,
and I am not convinced that the Navy SEALS assassinated bin Laden.
To me that all sounds like a fairy tale that contradicts the evidence.
As we have learned from the declassification of NSA files, the JFK-assassination conspiracy theorists were basically correct (see Lamar Waldron, Legacy of Secrecy).
Many of us are convinced that ofttimes news stories are distorted, suppressed, selectively used, and even sometimes invented out of whole cloth —
especially when we find that we ourselves have become the news.
The misreporting is mind-boggling, and it cannot be explained away as the innocent result of tight deadlines or partial information; it is intentional, with malice aforethought.
Many of us are convinced that gerrymandering and voter suppression result in unfair elections.
Many of us are convinced that corporations, especially after having set up the World Trade Organization, can and do overrule national laws.
Many of us are convinced that banks have more power than governments.
Many of us are convinced that wars are declared and conducted not to liberate the oppressed, but to steal resources and to enrich bankers and weapons manufacturers.
Many of us are convinced that the US is actively engaged in destabilizing other governments, some of them democratically elected.
Many of us are convinced that multibillionaires and oligarchs are pulling strings behind the scenes, resulting in what is effectively a shadow government.
Many of us are convinced that organized crime has a disproportionately large influence in government affairs,
and that, indeed, many politicians act no differently than gangsters.
Many of us are convinced that Jeff Sharlet’s terrifying book, The Family, is essentially correct.
In my opinion, these are legitimate concerns, based on credible documentation.
Then Alex Jones comes along and coöpts these concerns, spinning them wildly out of control,
making himself, in the process, one of the most
obnoxious public figures in the entire US.
When Jones coöpts our legitimate suspicions, we find ourselves smeared by association, and our credibility destroyed.
When people enunciate their legitimate concerns, they come across as naught other than just more |
Back when I lived in Western New York, I had the occasional encounter with the police.
Occasional. Like at least once a month.
There was one encounter in particular that convinced me to leave that part of the country forever.
That particular encounter showed me something.
It showed me that the police, in addition to being merciless and violent thugs with an intelligence somewhat akin to that of a slime mold,
also have a peculiar interest in small children, a very disturbing interest in small children.
That got me to wonder about something.
A few days ago I received an email from Ocean Recovery in the UK, which requested that I add a graphic to this page.
I hereby do so. It deals with the “War on Drugs,” which, I hope most of us have figured out by now, is anything but a war on drugs.
Pretty interesting, and, as far as I can determine, pretty accurate.
The police I encountered seemed also to have a most peculiar interest in this topic as well —
a most pecular interest, or perhaps obsession would be a better word.
As the police were priding themselves on doing a superlative psychoanalysis of me,
I realized quite clearly that they were actually describing themselves.
Oh. I mentioned above that there are countless wacko ideas. Yes.
Remember how the hippie movement got started circa 1967?
It was the work, I’m sure, of the FBI’s Cointelpro, and it was done to discredit the antiwar movement.
The shrinks at the FBI correctly gauged that youngsters would be swept away by the
example their agents set with long hair and beads and a recently banned common backyard weed and a defiantly proud inarticulateness.
It worked wonders.
The hippies coöpted the antiwar movement and thereby inadvertently discredited it. Exactly according to plan.
(No, I have no proof of this, but it’s all so bloody obvious, isn’t it?)
Similarly, I’m convinced that many or most of the current-day wackos are government operatives
who wish to tarnish all the rest of us with their broad brush.
No, despite what the wackos say, our politicians are not reptiles in disguise (though I admit that the idea is poetically apt).
Yes, industry-induced climate shift is real and not a Chinese hoax. (Will that myth be used as an excuse for a war?)
No, the Méxicans are not taking over the US;
no, the “Globalists” (a euphemism for “Jews”) are not controlling the world, secretly or otherwise;
no, the UK is not bent upon global domination;
no, there is no morgue of extraterrestrials in Roswell.
When the rest of us simply point out corruption and deception,
we are pigeon-holed together with this other nonsense and that is why we are branded lunatics.
Well, like, hey, you know.
FRIDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2018: Just ran across this, and I wasn’t even looking for it.
Well, you know, these computerized targeted suggestions on the Internet know exactly what they’re doing:
CIA Hippie Mind Control: Inside Laurel Canyon with Dave McGowan
See? I told you I never cared for rock music.
Speaking of reptiles, of course, leads us to this monstrous research:
“Cloned Human Embryos As Well As Animal Human Hybrids?,” Sky News.
When it disappears, right-click and save-as here.
The implications are staggering. We’re in trouble.
MKUltra Mind Control: America’s Secret War — History Channel
Think this has stopped? Not a chance.
When it disappears, right-click and save-as here.