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Important Stuff - ICYMI
9/11 at 15: The Falling Dominoes of September
September 11, 2016
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout
And soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
-- Robert Penn Warren, "All the King's Men"
Every one of us can close our eyes and go back to that day. The images will be there, projected on the backs of our eyelids in vivid color. The uncertainty after the initial explosion, the jarring realization after the second, the paper raining on the city from the gashes in the buildings followed by the bodies raining from the windows when they chose falling over fire. Finally, the collapse, the fury of dust and ash boiling through the city, people painted white with the bonemeal of co-workers and undone concrete as they ran, and ran, and ran.
In the days to follow we were confronted with the faces of those who charged in when everyone else was running out, trying to save as many as they could. In the close-knit firefighter neighborhoods of Rockaway, there was keening from behind closed doors in anticipation of the funeral bell services to come. Blue skies became a menacing thing, airplanes in flight an active threat. Most of us were not in those doomstruck buildings, not on the streets of New York when it happened, not in the Pentagon or in a Pennsylvania field, but in a great many ways we were all running for our lives that day. We are still running all these years later, and the ashes are still in our hair.
We are still running because September 11 never ended. To the contrary, it grew, expanded, metastasized and ultimately subsumed this nation. We are a wildly different place, and a wildly different people than we were fifteen years ago. We are barefoot at the airport talking on tapped phones with the latest war dispatches garbling from the television. Down in the basement, a pile of plastic sheeting and duct tape lays in the corner under a shroud of cobwebs.
We accept these things after a decade and a half of taming and training. The cops look like soldiers now, the neighborhoods they patrol no longer areas to protect and serve but hostile territories to be conquered, and this is supposed to be normal. Police in military gear wreak havoc in Ferguson and elsewhere. Citizens become enemy combatants to be shot down or choked out because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. September 11 gave us that, thanks to the wars.
The dominoes began falling early. "We have to counteract the shockwave of the evildoer," said George W. Bush less than a month after the attack, "by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates." There was the invasion of Afghanistan, which pivoted almost immediately into an invasion of Iraq that has proven to be the single greatest foreign policy blunder in American history, "Mission Accomplished" notwithstanding. Well, "blunder" may be too strong a word; after all, George and his friends made a mint off the years of war that followed. Thus, Mr. Bush fulfilled his destiny.
When Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army because they were Sunni Hussein loyalists, ISIS was born. These were not teenagers throwing rocks in the streets. The Iraqi Army was battle-tested from the long conflict with the US, and some within the ranks had even seen action in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. They know tactics and they know strategy, and when Bush's war in Iraq created a massive refugee crisis that upended Syria, they found fertile ground in which to grow. In truth, however, ISIS was born on that perfect Tuesday morning to the scream of airplane engines and the smell of scorched blood.
September 11 gave us the horror and shame of Abu Ghraib as well as the disgrace of Guantánamo Bay. It gave us the concept of the Unitary Executive through which the president wields unlimited power in defiance of constitutional law. The PATRIOT Act exploded the surveillance dam and flooded the nation with watching eyes and ears. The trillions spent on the wars combined with Bush's early tax cuts for rich people turned the economic downturn into almost an extinction-level event. Convenient terror alerts became a nimble way to control the national conversation. We had to watch what we say, after all. Meanwhile, the corporate "news" media lapped it up like dogs. War footage makes for great ratings.
After September 11 we somehow became a nation that needed a week to get water to the Superdome in New Orleans to help the survivors after Hurricane Katrina. This was institutional racism, but it was also more: we became a nation of blunderers after that Tuesday. We managed to murder a fair swath of the Gulf of Mexico when the Deepwater Horizon blew out. The best we could do on health care reform was to deliver the whole thing to the insurance industry. Congress contemplated new and novel ways to deny people the vote while forcing transvaginal ultrasounds on women seeking legal abortions. People saw Jesus in the red pulp of sliced tomatoes. It is all of a piece.
Oh, and we got the absurd presidential election of 2016 featuring a woman who voted for both the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War Resolution, and a man whose racism, sexism, rank ignorance and flat-out fearmongering would be as clownish as his bright orange mien were it not so unutterably dangerous. When a nation bends its knee to fear, allows itself to be robbed, lied to and spied upon with no consequences in the offing for the perpetrators, Hillary v. Donald is pretty much the unavoidable byproduct of that rank stew.
The falling dominoes of September 11, more than anything, have left us a nation entombed in shadow and gloom. The horizon holds no hope, but is to be feared, for The Enemy may be huddled there just out of sight. Fifteen years and a day ago, we were a profoundly different people, until the following dawn when that horizon birthed us for the worse. It has not ended. It may never end. It is the clenched fist in our chest.
We greeted the 21st century with great anticipation. One year, nine months and eleven days into that new century, that anticipation exploded in sorrow and dread. Fifteen years later, the pall of poison smoke from that day still hangs low over us all. The great mission for the remainder of this century is plain: We must get out from under the control mechanism September 11 has become. We must stop the dominoes from falling. Doing so will require a foray into our deepest selves, a confrontation with what we have allowed to happen. It will not be easy, for there are some who enjoy being afraid and have a need to be told what to do, and they will fight to keep matters as they stand. There is also the monstrous profit motive to overcome. There will be pain, but pain always walks hand in hand with healing.
This is our mission in the years to come. It must be done. The alternative is dissolution and despair.
So let us begin.
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Do Not Resist': A chilling look at the normalization of warrior cops
By Radley Balko September 30
https://youtu.be/4Zt7bl5Z_oA
The haunting thing about the new policing documentary “Do Not Resist” is what it doesn’t show. There are no images of cops beating people. No viral videos of horrifying shootings. Sure, there are scenes from the Ferguson protests in which riot cops deploy tear gas. But there’s no blood, no Tasings, no death. Yet when it was over, I had to force myself to exhale.
What makes this movie so powerful is its terrifying portrayal of the mundanities of modern policing. I watched the movie weeks ago, but there are scenes that still flicker in my head. We all remember the clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson. We’ve seen the photos. We saw the anger and the animus exchanged across the protest lines. What we didn’t see were the hours and hours before and after those moments. We didn’t see the MRAPs and other armored vehicles roll in, one at a time, slowly transforming an American town into a war zone. We didn’t hear the clomp of combat boots on asphalt in the quiet hours of the early morning, interrupted only by fuzzy dispatches over police radio.
It’s one thing to show an MRAP — a vehicle built for war, and for a very specific purpose in a very specific type of war — being misused after a small-town police agency obtained it from the Defense Department. “Do Not Resist” takes you to the base where those vehicles are stored. A camera trained on the window captures hundreds of MRAPs — rows and rows and rows of them — scrolling by, all destined for a police agency somewhere in America. Meanwhile, an Army specialist explains how the troops who use the vehicles get hours and hours of training before they’re entrusted to drive the trucks on a battlefield. The Pentagon then gives the trucks to police agencies to use on U.S. streets with no accompanying training at all. Sometimes, the specialist says, a police agency will find a body part in one of the trucks. They try to avoid that. But after all, these are machines of war.
The film crew then takes a ride with a small-town sheriff as he drives his hulking new MRAP through business districts and quiet neighborhoods — that is, once he figures out how to operate it. The most disturbing thing about this scene isn’t the truck itself, or the striking images of the truck in the town, or even the sheriff’s statement that it will probably mostly be used for drug raids. The most disturbing thing is that it simply doesn’t occur to the sheriff that the footage might be disturbing. He has no problem letting a film crew show this massive contraption built to withstand roadside bombs in a military convoy lumbering through his small town, because the notion that military vehicles aren’t appropriate for domestic policing is foreign to him.
Then there’s the drug raid. It’s one thing to read about a “dynamic entry” drug raid in which the police mistakenly or intentionally kill someone, or in which someone mistakenly or intentionally kills a police officer. It’s awful and tragic and unnecessary. “Do Not Resist” doesn’t show one of those. It instead shows the sort of drug raid that’s far more common. The movie depicts the raid from the beginning, as the officers from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department tactical team are meeting to discuss strategy. Some are wearing T-shirts with the tactical team’s logo. It’s a human skull imposed over two crossed AR-15s.
There are no children at the residence, the lead officer assures his colleagues. (There were.) There would be a significant quantity of illegal drugs at the house, another says. (There weren’t.) The tactical team then proceeds to raid the home of a black family in Richland County. Most officers storm the front door with their guns while one shatters some side windows as a distraction. Minutes go by. The officers’ body language eventually shows signs of frustration as their search for contraband continues to come up empty. Finally, someone finds a book bag with traces of marijuana at the bottom — not enough to smoke, much less sell. They arrest a young black man with long braids for possession.
“I never one time said you’re a bad person,” the lead officer tells his arrestee, with an odd cordiality. “I just have a job to do, and you happen to be in the middle of it.”
The officer also seems to know that the man is a student at a local technical college. He’s working toward a degree in construction. The man also runs a landscaping company to help pay for his education. The man later tells the officer that he was on his way to pick up some lawnmowers that morning. Knowing that he’s about to be arrested, he asks the officer if he could tell his employee that he was arrested and won’t be able to pick up the lawnmowers. He then gives the officer $876 in cash and asks it to give it to his employee to go pick up the mowers, along with a weed-eater.
Instead, the officer confiscates the money under civil asset forfeiture laws. There is no obvious connection between the money and the pot residue. The man volunteered the cash, mostly because he didn’t want his arrest to hurt his business. In doing so, he provided ample evidence that the cash had nothing to do with illegal activity. Still, if unchallenged, the $876 will go back to the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, even if the man is never charged with a crime. The cost of hiring an attorney for such a challenge would likely exceed $876.
Meanwhile, the man’s father asks the officers whether the police would pay for the windows they just shattered. The lead officer tells him that breaking the windows was a tactic, then adds, “The moral of the story is, don’t sell drugs from your residence.” Perhaps realizing that he had no evidence for what he had just accused the man of doing, he tried to correct himself. “I didn’t say you were actually doing it, I just said — said you were associated with … ” and then there’s some mumbling.
The striking thing about the footage is, again, the utter mundanity of the raid. A family was just violently raided over an immeasurable amount of pot. A man was arrested over that pot. The money he needed for his business was taken from him. Yet there’s no shame or embarrassment from the officers. There’s no panic that the whole thing was captured on video. That’s when it hits you. They don’t think they’ve made a mistake. This is what they do. The lead officers later tells the camera, matter-of-factly, that the raid turned up “a personal use amount of marijuana.” Perhaps realizing that he was also on camera back at the police station promising a much larger stash of drugs, he adds, “It happens. Drug warrants are, you know, 50-50.”
The documentary also eschews voice-overs and talking heads and simply lets law enforcement officers speak for themselves. You don’t need a civil rights activist or ACLU attorney to tell you about the threats posed by militaristic, aggressive policing when law enforcement officers can make the point unintentionally — and thus more powerfully and persuasive — when they’re speaking freely.
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For example, the directors attended one of the many SWAT competitions across the country. One SWAT cop officer reflected on his first raid. “I was just trying not to smile. I thought it was so fun. I thought it was so cool,” he says. Since then, he says, he always loves to watch the “SWAT pups” (his term for first-year SWAT officers) on their first raid. “They’re always just smiling from ear to ear. They’re just on top of the world.” At risk of stating the obvious, the officers he’s describing are about to stage an armed, potentially lethal invasion of a private residence.
Fittingly, the most chilling scene in the movie doesn’t take place on a city street, or at a protest, or during a drug raid. It takes place in a conference room. It’s from a police training conference with Dave Grossman, one of the most prolific police trainers in the country. Grossman’s classes teach officers to be less hesitant to use lethal force, urge them to be willing to do it more quickly and teach them how to adopt the mentality of a warrior. Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who shot and killed Philando Castille in July, had attended one of Grossman’s classes called “The Bulletproof Warrior” (though that particular class was taught by Grossman’s business partner, Jim Glennon).
In the class recorded for “Do Not Resist,” Grossman at one point tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives. The room chuckles. But he’s clearly serious. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”
Grossman closes the class with a (literal) chest-pounding motivational speech that climaxes with Grossman telling the officers to find an overpass overlooking the city they serve. He urges them to look down on their city and know that they’ve made the world a better place. He then urges them to grip the overpass railing, lean forward and “let your cape blow in the wind.” The room gives him a standing ovation.
Later, the documentary crew returns to the home of the South Carolina family that had been raided. The man the police arrested has been released from custody. “I thought they were looking for a terrorist,” says the man’s mother. “They tore down my house, my son went to jail, for a gram-and-a-half of marijuana that they shook out the bottom of a book bag.” In the background, a TV is tuned to live coverage of the funeral of South Carolina state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church whom Dylann Roof was charged with murdering in 2015.
Horrific as that South Carolina crime was, such incidents are thankfully rare. Crimes like that, the vicious beatings caught on viral videos and shootings by police officers get most of the attention — and they ought to get more. But it’s the mundanities of the drug war, the criminal-justice system and everyday policing that are far more destructive, pervasive and pernicious. And that’s what makes this movie so important.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-warrior-cops/
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There are many ugly, frightening things happening in the country. This is one of the worst.
10/5/16
Here is an example of what's in store for us.
Official 'Outraged' About Charges After KC Library Arrests
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Oct 3, 2016, 3:20 PM E
The executive director the Kansas City library system says he is "outraged" that prosecutors continue to pursue charges against a man who was arrested after asking pointed questions during a library discussion about the Middle East peace process and an employee who tried to intervene.
Although the arrests occurred in May following a speech by author and diplomat Dennis Ross, the library system only recently went public about its opposition to charges, the Kansas City Star reported (http://j.mp/2dF1IqE).
R. Crosby Kemper III, executive director of the city's library system, said "we're going to be living in a different kind of country" if people can be arrested for asking questions at a library. "If this kind of behavior is unacceptable to the police, then I guess we're going to have to shut the library down."
Issues arose after Ross finished speaking and took a question from Jeremy Rothe-Kushel concerning whether Jewish Americans like Rothe-Kushel should be concerned about actions by the U.S. and Israel that amount to "state-sponsored terrorism."
"When are we going to stand up and be ethical Jews and Americans?" Rothe-Kushel asked.
When Rothe-Kushel tried to ask another question, a private security guard grasped his arm, followed by an off-duty police officer, both employed by the Jewish Community Foundation. Rothe-Kushel then shouted, "Get your hands off of me right now!"
Steve Woolfolk, director of public programming for the library, tried to intervene. Both men were arrested by off-duty officers.
"Every police officer who was on duty that evening was very communicative and respectful," Rothe-Kushel said. But he said he would have left if he had been asked to and given the chance to do so.
Kansas City police spokeswoman Capt. Stacey Graves said off-duty officers hired by the event sponsor acted properly in helping private security stop an audience member from asking follow-up questions.
Rothe-Kushel is charged in city court with trespassing and resisting arrest. Woolfolk is charged with interfering with an arrest. Woolfolk said he suffered a torn medial collateral ligament in his knee when a police officer kneed him in the leg.
Kemper said the private security guards had no right to remove a patron for asking a question.
Ross' speech was the inaugural Truman and Israel Lecture, established by the Truman Library Institute and the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City.
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Information from: The Kansas City Star, http://www.kcstar.com
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Oilfield Wastewater Used to Grow Food in California May Contain Toxins
Friday, 28 October 2016 00:00
By Maureen Nandini Mitra, Earth Island Journal
Did you know that some of the fruits and veggies out on supermarket shelves are grown using wastewater from oil and gas operations? For the past several years, many drought-stricken farms in California's Central Valley, which produces 40 percent of the nation's fruits and vegetables, have been increasingly irrigating their crops with wastewater -- a practice the US Department of Agriculture does not restrict.
Now a new report by the Environmental Working Group says that this wastewater is possibly tainted with toxic chemicals, including chemicals that can cause cancer and reproductive harm. Farmers in Kern County have irrigated some 95,000 acres of food crops with billions of gallons of oil field wastewater, according to the report, which is based on an analysis of state data.
Actually, oil companies have been quietly selling wastewater for irrigation in California for decades, but it's only in recent years that the matter has become public knowledge. In the past, the state required regular testing for only a handful of pollutants to satisfy permit requirements for use of wastewater on agriculture. This is the first time we are getting a detailed look at the makeup of the toxic cocktail that could be lurking in the water.
According to state data, oil companies operating in California have reported that recycled wastewater sold to Kern County irrigation districts since 2014 contained more than 20 million pounds and 2 million gallons of dozens of toxic chemicals. These chemicals included 16 that the state classifies as carcinogens or reproductive toxicants. Levels of the chemicals were not measured and a full assessment of what exactly is in this water is pretty much impossible because the companies have withheld the identity of almost 40 percent of the chemicals as so-called trade secrets.
Currently, the lightly treated wastewater is blended with fresh water and then applied to almonds, pistachios, and citrus trees, as well as to grapes, carrots, beans, tomatoes, and potatoes grown in the Cawelo, North Kern, Jasmin, and Kern-Tulare Water Districts in Kern and Tulare Counties. According to an earlier EWG report, in some of these places the water can even be used as drinking water for livestock and for farmed fish.
Although crops grown with this recycled water represent a small percentage of the food grown in the Central Valley, once the produce is at the grocery store, there's no way of telling it apart from other fruits and vegetables.
The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board has appointed an expert food safety panel to study the possible impact of using wastewater to grow food. Its findings are expected next year.
Despite the new information about the mix of toxic chemicals present in oilfield wastewater, the California water board has refused to halt the practice, and, according to EWG, it is even allowing the expansion of the irrigation method.
But EGW researchers say that while there's cause for concern, it doesn't mean that we should stop eating produce from California.
"Although it is well-established that pollutants in water and soil can build up in crops -- especially root crops such as carrots and potatoes, which are grown in Kern County with oil field wastewater -- scientists don't know if that poses a health risk for people who eat the food," says the report, written by EWG senior scientist Tasha Stoiber. "A healthy diet high in fruits and vegetables outweighs uncertainties about chemicals in produce."
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This is an example of a practice that can go on for a very long time before any likely health effect is detected. Since corporations never care about anything but profit we are never made aware of any risks. If potential harm is publicized business always fights any suggested remedy; that can take years to resolve especially due to government's disinterest in consumer protection over corporate "relationships."
We are all lab-rats depending on our interests and what we consume. And, few really care.
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Too Smug to Jail
'The Economist' issues a myopic defense of the white-collar criminal
By Matt Taibbi
As we reach the close of an election season marked by anger toward the unaccountable rich, The Economist has chimed in with a defense of the beleaguered white-collar criminal.
An editorial called "Jail bait" is the latest in a line of salvoes against what the magazine imagines is a wave of politically driven regulatory actions against corporate executives.
The piece makes many of the usual Wall Street arguments: locking up executives wouldn't do any good, populist passions are ignorant, etc. But this is the crucial passage:
"Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing—long chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants."
Yikes! This extraordinary argument is cousin to the Lieutenant Calley defense, i.e., that soldiers bear no responsibility for crimes they were ordered to execute. The Economist here would have you believe that there's no such thing as an individual crime in a corporate context.
This is a line you hear a lot not only in the finance community, but among the lawyers who defend the likes of banks and pharmaceutical companies.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, now back in his comfy old role as a partner in a prominent corporate defense firm, said almost exactly the same thing in a speech in New York two years ago (emphasis mine):
"It remains true that, at some institutions that engaged in inappropriate conduct before, and may yet again, the buck still stops nowhere. Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated, that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution's culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual."
That was a sitting attorney general saying people don't commit crimes – corporate culture commits crimes. No wonder there were no meaningful prosecutions after the financial crisis of 2008.
Ambrose Bierce once said that a corporation was "an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." Bierce was being funny, but this "individuals can't commit corporate crime" argument, sadly, is serious.
It's an idea grounded in a belief system backed by syllogistic reasoning. We live in a capitalist economy; private companies need to innovate and take risks in order to succeed; therefore, we should not do anything to discourage innovation or risk-taking, or what The Economist calls "testing the rules":
"Society should by all means punish white-collar criminals if they have obviously committed crimes and imposed harm. But it should resist the temptation to criminalize new businesses testing the rules. And it should certainly resist the temptation to single people out for harsh punishment simply because they are rich and successful."
The magazine decries the backlash against banks after 2008 as irrational populism. It also praises prosecutors for not bringing cases against firms for things like selling faulty mortgage-backed securities, which are described as "perfectly legal (if unwise)."
But this just isn't true. Most of the Wall Street scams that triggered what The Economist would decry as "populist" outrage in recent years weren't just morally despicable, but bluntly illegal. Many were just skyscraper-level versions of street crimes.
A Mexican-American racetrack owner launders perhaps tens of millions for Mexican drug gangs and gets 20 years. HSBC does the same thing on a much grander scale and everyone walks.
In the mortgage fraud cases, companies knowingly sold defective products to institutional investors, pension funds being a classic customer. Whistleblowers told of executives who knew they were selling investors packets of home loans prone to default, and did it anyway.
These executives weren't "testing the rules" in an effort to innovate their way to the next superconductor or smartphone. This was just plain old criminal fraud, ripping people off, with minorities and the elderly suffering disproportionate losses. The state of Illinois got $84 million from just one bank, Citigroup, for its fraudulent marketing of dangerous securities to state retirement funds.
In a non-corporate context, we'd consider this among the most serious kinds of crimes that we punish. What sentence would you want for someone who stole from your parents' retirement money? From your local teachers' union?
It's bad enough that the self-pitying jerks on Wall Street who read magazines like The Economist think that paying taxes or giving employees benefits or adhering to any labor or environmental standards are unconscionable burdens. Now we're supposed to be so grateful for their sociopathic pursuit of profits that we should excuse them from the criminal code, too?
What a bunch of clueless weasels these people are. Always lecturing the poor for wanting a free lunch, when they're the ones begging for a free ride.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...o-jail-w447825
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The rich, the powerful, the connected never commit crimes they just make "simple mistakes." It's only those below them that must be punished for ANY mistake they make. Selling loose cigarettes got someone killed.
Rules and laws are made for those who are not in the "club." Anyone that tries to change things gets stomped. Bernie Sanders got the trademarked "treatment" from the DEMS.
https://youtu.be/i5dBZDSSky0
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Democrats, Trump, And The Ongoing Dangerous Refusal To Learn The Lesson Of Brexit
Glenn Greenwald
THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.
After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
For those who tried to remove themselves from the self-affirming, vehemently pro-Clinton elite echo chamber of 2016, the warning signs that Brexit screechingly announced were not hard to see. Two short passages from a Slate interview I gave in July summarized those grave dangers: that opinion-making elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
Like most everyone else who saw the polling data and predictive models of the media’s self-proclaimed data experts, I long believed Clinton would win, but the reasons why she very well could lose were not hard to see. The warning lights were flashing in neon for a long time, but they were in seedy places that elites studiously avoid. The few people who purposely went to those places and listened, such as Chris Arnade, saw and heard them loud and clear. The ongoing failure to take heed of this intense but invisible resentment and suffering guarantees that it will fester and strengthen. This was the last paragraph of my July article on the Brexit fallout:
Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future.
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Beyond the Brexit analysis, there are three new points from last night’s results that I want to emphasize, as they are unique to the 2016 U.S. election and, more importantly, illustrate the elite pathologies that led to all of this:
1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.
You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.
When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.
But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.
It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.
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Of course there are fundamental differences between Obama’s version of “change” and Trump’s. But at a high level of generality — which is where these messages are often ingested — both were perceived as outside forces on a mission to tear down corrupt elite structures, while Clinton was perceived as devoted to their fortification. That is the choice made by Democrats — largely happy with status quo authorities, believing in their basic goodness — and any honest attempt by Democrats to find the prime author of last night’s debacle will begin with a large mirror.
2. That racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are pervasive in all sectors of America is indisputable from even a casual glance at its history, both distant and recent.
There are reasons why all presidents until 2008 were white and all 45 elected presidents have been men. There can be no doubt that those pathologies played a substantial role in last night’s outcome. But that fact answers very few questions and begs many critical ones.
To begin with, one must confront the fact that not only was Barack Obama elected twice, but he is poised to leave office as a highly popular president: now viewed more positively than Reagan. America wasn’t any less racist and xenophobic in 2008 and 2012 than it is now. Even stalwart Democrats fond of casually branding their opponents as bigots are acknowledging that a far more complicated analysis is required to understand last night’s results. As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn put it: “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story.” Matt Yglesias acknowledged that Obama’s high approval rating is inconsistent with depictions of the U.S. as a country “besotted with racism.”
People often talk about “racism/sexism/xenophobia” vs. “economic suffering” as if they are totally distinct dichotomies. Of course there are substantial elements of both in Trump’s voting base, but the two categories are inextricably linked: The more economic suffering people endure, the angrier and more bitter they get, the easier it is to direct their anger to scapegoats. Economic suffering often fuels ugly bigotry. It is true that many Trump voters are relatively well-off and many of the nation’s poorest voted for Clinton, but, as Michael Moore quite presciently warned, those portions of the country that have been most ravaged by free trade orgies and globalism — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa — were filled with rage and “see [Trump] as a chance to be the human Molotov cocktail that they’d like to throw into the system to blow it up.” Those are the places that were decisive in Trump’s victory.
As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney put it:
Low-income rural white voters in Pa. voted for Obama in 2008 and then Trump in 2016, and your explanation is white supremacy? Interesting.
It has long been, and still is, a central American challenge to rid society of these structural inequalities. But one way to ensure those scapegoating dynamics fester rather than erode is to continue to embrace a system that excludes and ignores a large portion of the population. Hillary Clinton was viewed, reasonably, as a stalwart devotee, beloved agent, and prime beneficiary of that system, and thus could not possibly be viewed as a credible actor against it.
3. Over the last six decades, and particularly over the last 15 years of the endless war on terror, both political parties have joined to construct a frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the executive branch to use it.
As a result, the president of the United States commands a vast nuclear arsenal that can destroy the planet many times over; the deadliest and most expensive military ever developed in human history; legal authorities that allow him to prosecute numerous secret wars at the same time, imprison people with no due process, and target people (including U.S. citizens) for assassination with no oversight; domestic law enforcement agencies that are constructed to appear and act as standing, para-militarized armies; a sprawling penal state that allows imprisonment far more easily than most Western countries; and a system of electronic surveillance purposely designed to be ubiquitous and limitless, including on U.S. soil.
Those who have been warning of the grave dangers these powers pose have often been dismissed on the ground that the leaders who control this system are benevolent and well-intentioned. They have thus often resorted to the tactic of urging people to imagine what might happen if a president they regarded as less than benevolent one day gained control of it. That day has arrived. One hopes this will at least provide the impetus to unite across ideological and partisan lines to finally impose meaningful limits on these powers that should never have been vested in the first place. That commitment should start now.
* * * * *
For many years, the U.S. — like the U.K. and other Western nations — has embarked on a course that virtually guaranteed a collapse of elite authority and internal implosion. From the invasion of Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis to the all-consuming framework of prisons and endless wars, societal benefits have been directed almost exclusively to the very elite institutions most responsible for failure at the expense of everyone else.
It was only a matter of time before instability, backlash, and disruption resulted. Both Brexit and Trump unmistakably signal its arrival. The only question is whether those two cataclysmic events will be the peak of this process, or just the beginning. And that, in turn, will be determined by whether their crucial lessons are learned — truly internalized — or ignored in favor of self-exonerating campaigns to blame everyone else.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/...son-of-brexit/
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Many useful links in the original.
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Dakota Access: 2,000 Veterans Head to Support Protesters, Offer Protection From Police
Q&A with Michael Wood Jr., a former Marine organizing a large veterans group headed to N.D.: 'If they want to shoot at 2,000 veterans...so be it.'
BY PHIL MCKENNA
Michael Wood Jr., a Marine Corps veteran and former Baltimore police officer, is leading a group of 2,000 veterans to North Dakota this weekend to join ongoing protests against the Dakota Access pipeline.
Wood, 37, made headlines last year for speaking out in a series of tweets against what he viewed as wrongdoing within his police department. He spoke out after Freddie Gray died from a spinal cord injury after being taken into custody by Baltimore police and is a prominent supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Earlier this month, Wood and fellow veteran Wes Clark Jr., son of former General Wesley Clark, put out a call for 500 veterans and $100,000 in funding to help oppose what they feel is escalating police violence against the Dakota Access protesters. The group, Veterans Stand for Standing Rock, had to end the sign-ups after 2,000 veterans signed on. The group has received more than $580,000 via an online funding campaign to help pay for travel costs, winter camping, communications, protective gear and money to post bail.
Thousands of protesters, mostly Native Americans, have camped since August just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation where the largely completed pipeline would cross the Missouri River. The standoff escalated on Nov. 20 when law enforcement used fire hoses, tear gas and stinger grenades on protesters who were trying to clear a roadblock at the end of bridge on a public highway. Last Friday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers notified the Standing Rock tribe that the public will no longer be allowed at the campsite, which is on federal land. On Monday, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple ordered an emergency evacuation of the camp. The Standing Rock tribe said the land is part of their ancestral treaty lands and that they will not leave.
ICN: Why are you doing this?
Michael Wood Jr.: I think a lot of us are doing this for different reasons. For Wes, he is very focused on ecological protection of the planet. If you are a conservative, you are watching hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on state-sanctioned agents of violence. [Editor's note: North Dakota officials said they have spent more than $10 million on additional law enforcement thus far.] If you are a libertarian, you care about property rights and freedom. Me personally as a police scientist [the study of police work and criminal justice], I am focused on police reform.
ICN: What do you hope to achieve?
MW: Personally, I want to go across the bridge and take the whole site. But as a whole group, the goal is to bring attention to it, that Native lives need to matter in our systems just like black lives need to matter in our systems. This is that moment in history where there is a change in the tide. Are we going to create the country that it was intended to be, where we care about all of our people and we protect them from state-sanctioned violence?
ICN: How is this connected to the Black Lives Matter movement?
MW: If we were to create systems and institutions that protected black lives, then we wouldn't have systems and institutions that allow the oppression of Native American lives that you are seeing right now and throughout our history.
ICN: What do you make of the tactics law enforcement are employing?
MW: These weapons that they think are okay to use are less-lethal weapons, not non-lethal weapons, which means they have an explicit possibility of killing someone.
ICN: The protest at Standing Rock started in April. Why are you doing this now?
MW: It really got to the point where it was just too much. A lot of credit goes to those protesters who are up there now who have created the attention that opened our eyes to understand that we need to get up there.
ICN: If you're only going to be there for three days, what can you accomplish?
MW: We're not going to be there for three days anymore. We were hoping and praying that we could get maybe 500 people and $100,000, but everyone has stepped in and really contributed. We've set up a new roster where we already have 500 people ready to stay there for the next shift. We are going to keep a contingency of 500 veterans there at all points in time.
ICN: How will your approach differ from prior demonstrations at Standing Rock?
MW: We're not releasing everything that we're doing, we do have some support missions, which we think can make a difference on their own. Beyond that, my primary focus is I want to cross the bridge [the bridge that protesters were standing on when police tried to push them back on Nov. 20]. I want to do it with negotiations. I want to talk to everybody there. If they [law enforcement] want to shoot at 2,000 veterans who are going to walk peacefully across a bridge, so be it. That is what we need to do to make sure that we protect our planet, stand up for Native American people, protect black lives, protect native lives and protect the Earth.
ICN: Have you been in contact with the Morton County Sheriff's Department or the Army Corps? What are they saying? How have you responded?
MW: We've reached out a few times and we've had some brief contact. I will go there personally myself. These cops don't want to do this. If we can't break the system, we can break the hearts and minds of those officers so they realize what they are doing. Hopefully with an entire battalion of people from around the nation who are vets and protecting this country, there is no way around it. There is going to be every race, every religion, every nationality, every geographic region of people that have served this county and stood on that wall. If they are willing to come after us, then that's fine. We'll take that brunt, but that is how you create 10,000 of us next time.
ICN: Is anyone telling you to stand down?
MW: You're always going to have some naysayers. I think that what the Morton County Sheriff's department, the governor and the Army Corps has said [abut evacuating the camp] was a desperate plea to get us to stand down. They think we were going to be scared, because they don't want to be out there in this cold. We're prepared for it. They're not.
ICN: Do recent announcements by the Army Corps and Gov. Jack Dalrymple to shut down the protest camp affect your plans in any way?
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MW: No way at all. It's a bluff. They don't have the force, and what are they going to do? Come in there and kick us off? We are there to support the tribes, if they [law enforcement] want us to pack up and move the camp somewhere else, so be it. I really don't understand why they think that is going to matter.
ICN: A recent video shows law enforcement putting up additional razor wire. It looks like they are preparing for your arrival.
MW: That's fine. I don't intend to win by force, I intend to win by rational negotiation.
ICN: But you are ready to use force if needed?
MW: We will not use force. They will use force. We will walk across roads that were publicly funded, that we paid for.
ICN: You previously said one issue the police are going to face is that your level of planning and coordination is vastly superior to theirs.
MW: The amount of experience we have is vastly superior to what they have collected. I don't mean that as an insult. We are going to stay calm. We are going to be disciplined. We are not going to be the one that is going to break across the line. They will. They have been doing it the whole time. There is no reason to believe anything else will be any different.
http://insideclimatenews.us2.list-ma...5&e=602ad8bcdf
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What is happening in ND, vicious abuse by corporations and their law enforcement lackeys, should be another warning to all of us of the relentless assault by business to trample everything and everyone in their way.
These veterans deserve tremendous support and respect.
12/3/16
Here is a sample of what corporations and their government sycophants do to peaceful protesters.
https://youtu.be/DazYeUWstAU
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Hostile Takeover
by LEWIS LAPHAM
DECEMBER 9, 2016
“The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.”
—Horace, Epistles
It’s been a month since the election, and in the mirrored halls of the news and social media the contributors of uplifting opinion have been telling themselves that no matter what else might be said about the campaigns and the vote, it was a great day for Democracy. Rough and tumble democracy in the raw, free-range, artisanal and organic, the will of the people trampling out the vintage of political correctness, emerging from the ash heap of vicious cant, texting “yes” to the Declaration of Independence, “no” to an uncivil transfer of power. Cue the music, roll the camera and the flag. The people have spoken. Our democracy lives. Government of the people, by the people and for the people is not perished from the earth.
Which might have been the case had Bernie Sanders been on the ballot. He wasn’t, and neither was democracy. What was on the ballot was plutocracy, complacently stupefied and transparently corrupt at the top of the Republican and the Democratic ticket. Two gold-plated names on the same boardroom door, both candidates representative of and privileged by a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich that for the last thirty years has been arranging the country’s political and socioeconomic affairs. The election campaign was the struggle for control of corporate management, Hillary Clinton seeking to fend off a hostile takeover by Donald Trump, the lady and the lout both standing four square and true blue for the freedom of money, steadfast and vigilant against the freedoms of movement and thought.
Clinton lost the election because she tried to pretend what she was not—a caring friend of all the people, ardent believer in the rule of law. She could talk the prerecorded talk, but she couldn’t walk the walk, her prior record, like her every move and gesture, showing her to be in it for herself, deserving of the deference owed to the Queen of England, the jack of diamonds and the ace of spades.
Trump won the election because he didn’t try to sell the Gettysburg Address. Upfront and fascist in his scorn for the democratic idea, he declared his candidacy on June 16, 2015, a deus ex machina descending by escalator into the atrium of Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, there to say, and say it plainly, democracy is for losers. Money, ladies and gentlemen, is power, and power, my friends, is not self-sacrificing or Democratic. Never was and never will be; law unto itself, and the only one that counts. Name of the game, nature of the beast.
The mogul could afford the luxury of truth because he was really, really rich, un-bought and un-bossed, so selfishly and fearlessly rich he was free to do and say whatever it came into his head to do and say, whatever it took to root out the cowardly incompetence in Washington, clean up the mess in the Middle East, plant well-paying jobs in the American heartland. His was the greatest brand on earth come to make America once again the greatest show on earth, revive it with the sweet smell of his signature men’s colognes, Empire and Success.
Trump didn’t need briefing papers or policy positions to refine the message. He embodied it live and in person, an unscripted and overweight canary flown from its gilded cage, telling it like it is from the inside looking out. Had he time or patience for messing around with books, he could have sourced his wisdom to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis, who in 1933 presented the case to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the outset of the New Deal:
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
In the world according to Trump, as it was in the worlds according to Alexander Hamilton and Ronald Reagan, democracy is a tip on a dead horse. An idea as far past its sell-by date as FDR’s straw hat, not up to the task of keeping America safe or running the trains on time. Too long-winded and slow, soft in the head and weak in the knees, no match for the barbarians (Mexican and African, radical Islamic and leftist academic) at the gates of Westchester County and Palm Beach.
Not the exact words in Trump’s self-glorifying mouth, but the gist of the commandment he brought down from his Mount Sinai penthouse suite in June 2015, the one that for the next eighteen months he tweeted to phone and shouted to camera in red states and blue, pandering to the popular resentment and loathing of the Washington politicians and Wall Street masters of the universe who for two generations have been playing ordinary Americans for suckers.
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Trump never tired of trash-talking the system of which he was a proud and ornamental figurehead, and the fans on fairgrounds in Kentucky and Ohio screamed and stamped in agreement because what he was saying they knew to be true—not as precept from a high-minded think tank but from their own downwardly mobile experience. Up close and personal they had suffered the consequences of the plutocracy’s ongoing and bi-partisan slum clearance project—class warfare waged by the increasingly frightened rich against the increasingly debt-burdened, disenfranchised and angry poor, the bulk of the nation’s wealth (actual and virtual, animal, mineral, vegetable and intellectual) amassed by 10% of its population, more laws restraining the freedom of persons, fewer laws limiting the license of property, the systematic juggling of the public light and land and air into the private purse, a national security apparatus herding sheep into the shelters of heavy law enforcement and harmless speech, every occupant of the White House from Reagan to Obama pleased to hold himself above the law, both houses of Congress reduced to impotent paralysis, a political discourse made by a news media presenting presidential candidates as game show contestants mounted on selfie sticks and played for jokes until brought to judgment on election night before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they are produced.
The camera doesn’t do democracy; democracy is the holding of one’s fellow citizens in respectful regard, not because they are beautiful or rich or famous but because they are one’s fellow citizens and therefore worth the knowing what they say and do. The work is tedious and slow; too many words with too little action doesn’t sell tickets. What sells tickets is celebrity, and because the camera sees but doesn’t think, it makes no meaningful or moral distinction between a bubble bath in Las Vegas staffed by pretty girls and a bloodbath in Palmyra staffed by headless corpses. The return on investment in both scene settings is the bankable flow of emotion drawn from the bottomless wells of human wish, dream, ignorance and fear.
It didn’t matter what Trump said or didn’t say, whether he was cute and pink or headless. The journalists on the road with the mogul’s traveling circus weren’t covering a play of ideas; like flies to death and honey, they were drawn to the sweet decaying smell of overripe celebrity, enchanted, as is their custom, by the romance of crime.
Blind to homespun shoes on common ground, the camera gazes adoringly at leather boots on horseback. So does the America movie-going public. Always a sight for sore eyes, the boots on horseback. They ride into town with the lonesome pine hero in the trail-weary saddle, knight errant, deadly and just, up against the odds and the system, come to remove the corrupt sheriff and redeem the God-fearing settlers, clean up the mess in the Middle West saloon, set the crooked straight, distribute moral fabric, civic virtue and a fair share of the loot to the storekeep, the shepherd and the school teacher.
Trump pitched his campaign on the storyline the movie-going electorate likes a lot better than the one about Honest Abe Lincoln. The networks, the cable channels and the self-adoring social media, hoisted him up there in lights with robber-barons Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, gunslingers Eastwood and Stallone, mafia dons Corleone and Soprano. November 8, 2016 may become a night to remember, but it wasn’t a great day for democracy.
http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001oj3AK...kp7aA2DTaTog==
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How Pure Is Your Hate?
Counterpunch, Paul Street
January 16. 2017
Fellow workers and citizens, how pure is your hatred? It’s easy to hate on openly authoritarian, loathsome, right-wing political personalities and institutions like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, Paul Ryan, the Republican Party, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Breitbart News, and FOX News. There’s no serious mystery over what those malicious people and entities are about: the ever upward distribution of wealth and power.
The bigger tests are supposedly liberal and progressive personalities and institutions like Barack Obama, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party, George Soros, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, the “Public” Broadcasting System (“P”BS), the Washington Post, MSNBC, and the New York Times.
These people and organizations are no less committed than the nation’s more transparently right-wing counterparts to the nation’s unelected deep state dictatorships of money, empire, and white-supremacy, but their allegiance and service to the nation’s reigning oppression structures and ideologies is cloaked by outwardly multicultural, liberal, and even progressive concern for the poor and nonwhite.
“What’s the Something Much Better?”
I was reminded of this distinction for the five thousandth time last Thursday while watching Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) member and “P”BS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff interview the longtime Senior Obama Advisor and intimate Obama family mentor and confidant Valerie Jarrett.
Read the following passage from the interview last week and then tell me, please, to quote Alexander Cockburn, “is your hate pure?”
Judy Woodruff, CFR and “P”BS: Just last night, the United States Senate took another step toward repeal of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. There was a budget vote, which is going to lead to other steps, which will lead to repeal. Just yesterday, the president-elect called Obamacare a complete and total disaster.
Valerie Jarrett, White House: I think it’s very easy to say repeal and replace, but we have been encouraging the Republicans, since the president first started embarking on this effort, to put in place a plan for affordable care to come up with their best ideas. And they have had, what, 50, 60 votes to repeal, and not a single replacement plan. So…
Woodruff: Well, they say that’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to get rid of what’s there now and replace it with something much better.
Jarrett: Well, what’s the something much better? That’s my question. That’s the question the president has been asking for eight years right now. So, if there is a something better, let’s hear it. What’s the secret?
Obama, 2003: “What I’d Like to See”
After this exchange, Woodruff moved off the health care topic, with no follow up. That was a statement in itself. Surely any reasonably informed “public” media journalist would be aware that national Canadian-style single-payer health insurance – Improved Medicare for All – has long been backed by most Americans. Such a journalist would know that single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to all the nation’s many millions of uninsured and under-insured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and being the most cost-effective way to go thanks to the elimination of private for-profit insurance corporations’ parasitic control over the system.
A knowledgeable “public” journalist might even know that then state senator Barack Obama endorsed single payer on these very grounds as late as the summer of 2003, when he said the following to the Illinois AFL-CIO:
“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see.”
Obama would quickly drop those sentiments in the interest of getting campaign backing from the nation’s giant insurance and drug companies and their Wall Street investors on his path to the U.S. Senate and the presidency.
Right after he entered the White House Obama set up a health care reform task force chock full of big insurance company representatives. Not one of the more than 80 U.S. House of Representative members who had endorsed single payer – not even the veteran Black Congressman John Conyers, author of a House single payer bill – was invited to participate.
A Sicko Game
The outcome was the so-called Affordable Care Act (later dubbed “Obamacare”), a complicated and corporatist bill based on a Republican plan drawn up by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Since it left the price- and premium-gouging and profit-taking power of the big insurance and drug syndicates intact, the ACA condemned a vast swath of the nation to continuing inadequate and unaffordable coverage – this while the right-wing noise machine has absurdly railed against “socialized health care.”
Along the way, the new neoliberal president played a sicko (yes, Michael Moore) game to sell his Heritage Foundation bill, promising citizens that his plan would include a public option while having already traded that policy away to get for-profit hospitals to back the ACA. As Miles Moguiescu reported on Huffington Post and as the New York Times confirmed, “Obama made a backroom deal…with the for-profit hospital lobby that he would make sure there would be no national public option in the final health reform legislation…Even while President Obama was saying that he thought a public option was a good idea and encouraging supporters to believe his healthcare plan would include one,” Moguiescu noted, “he had promised for-profit hospital lobbyists that there would be no public option in the final bill.”
We can be certain that the veteran agent of neoliberal mendacity Valerie Jarrett advised Obama to take this deeply duplicitous path.
The Memory Hole
It’s quite remarkable how completely the dominant “mainstream” media-politics culture manages to throw majority-supported social-democratic policy proposals down George Orwell’s memory hole.
Listening to the Woodruff-Jarrett conversation, you’d think Bernie Sanders had never spoken to giant and enthusiastic crowds on behalf of single payer last year.
You’d think Conyers had never drafted single-payer legislation backed by a considerable number of U.S. Congressman.
You’d think that Canada and most of the industrialized world had never successfully implemented a widely popular nation-wide systems of universal governmental health insurance.
You’d think single-payer didn’t have millions of citizen backers – including many thousands of doctors and National Nurses United – from coast to coast.
You wouldn’t imagine that even Donald Trump has mused that single-payer might be the best way to fund health insurance for all.
“So, if there is a something better, let’s hear it. What’s the secret?”
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Unreal.
It reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s response as head of newly elected U.S. President Bill Clinton’s health care task force when Dr. David Himmelstien, the head of Physicians for a National Health Program, told her about the incredible possibilities of a comprehensive, single payer “Canadian style” health plan, supported by more than two-thirds of the U.S. public and certified by the Congressional Budget Office as “the most cost-effective plan on offer.”
“David,” Hillary (Michael Moore’s heart throb) commented with fading patience before sending him away in 1993, “tell me something interesting.”
That’s right: tell me something interesting.
Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the co-presidents Bill and Hill decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care “discussion.” What she advanced instead of the system that bored her was a hopelessly complex and secretly developed program called “managed competition.” Interesting. Obama would have more success with his Heritage Foundation-developed update in 2009 and 2010.
And they wonder why Trump won.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/...-is-your-hate/
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Law Enforcement Has Been Using OnStar, SiriusXM To Eavesdrop, Track Car Locations For More Than Fifteen Years.
from the no-amount-of-premium-gasoline-will-buy-loyalty dept
Thomas Fox-Brewster of Forbes is taking a closer look at a decade-plus of in-car surveillance, courtesy of electronics and services manufacturers are installing in as many cars as possible.
Following the news that cops are trying to sweat down an Amazon Echo in hopes of hearing murder-related conversations, it's time to revisit the eavesdropping that's gone on for years prior to today's wealth of in-home recording devices.
One of the more recent examples can be found in a 2014 warrant that allowed New York police to trace a vehicle by demanding the satellite radio and telematics provider SiriusXM provide location information.
In this case, SiriusXM complied by turning on its "stolen vehicle recovery" mode, which allowed law enforcement to track the vehicle for ten days. SiriusXM told Forbes it only does this in response to search warrants and court orders. That may be the case for real-time tracking, but any location information captured and stored by SiriusXM can be had with nothing more than a subpoena, as this info is normally considered a third-party record.
It's not just satellite radio companies allowing cops to engage in surreptitious tracking. OnStar and other in-vehicle services have been used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on personal conversations between drivers and passengers.
In at least two cases, individuals unwittingly had their conversations listened in on by law enforcement. In 2001, OnStar competitor ATX Technologies (which later became part of Agero) was ordered to provide "roving interceptions" of a Mercedes Benz S430V. It initially complied with the order in November of that year to spy on audible communications for 30 days, but when the FBI asked for an extension in December, ATX declined, claiming it was overly burdensome.
[...]
In 2007, the OnStar system in a Chevrolet Tahoe belonging to a Gareth Wilson in Ohio contacted OnStar staff when an emergency button was pushed. As noted in a 2008 opinion from the case, Wilson was unaware the button had been hit. Subsequently, an OnStar employee heard the occupants discussing a possible drug deal, and allowed an officer from the Fairfield County Sheriff's Office to listen to the conversation. When the vehicle was located and searched, marijuana was found and an indictment filed days later. Ironically, the suspect hadn't even signed up to the OnStar service, but it hadn't been switched off.
The 2001 case didn't end well for law enforcement. It wasn't that the court had an issue with the eavesdropping, but rather that the act of listening in limited the functionality of the in-car tech, which the court found to be overly-burdensome.
OnStar is also asked to engage in real-time tracking by law enforcement. While OnStar denies it collects location info, it too has a stolen car recovery mode that allows OnStar to track vehicles. OnStar also says it will only do this in response to warrants and court orders -- or unless "exigent circumstances" necessitate the bypassing of these constitutional protections. What OnStar definitely won't do is let the public know how many times law enforcement has asked to track vehicles. The company told Forbes it "doesn't release the number of these requests."
Plenty of vehicles come with built-in GPS-reliant devices, most of which perform some sort of data retention. Anything not considered to be "real-time" can be obtained without a warrant, thanks to the incredibly-outdated Third Party Doctrine. Private conversations can be captured and recorded with warrants, which makes a large number of vehicles on the road confidential informants on standby.
Courts have generally been sympathetic to law enforcement use of in-car technology, finding the use of built-in "tools" to be less intrusive than officers installing their own devices on suspects' vehicles. Certainly law enforcement finds these pre-equipped listening/tracking devices more convenient as well.
The expansion of in-car tech has led to a great many opportunities for law enforcement, at the expense of privacy expectations. While drivers certainly can't "reasonably" expect their travels on public roads to be "private," the collection of location data by third parties basically puts drivers under constant surveillance, relieving law enforcement from the burden of actually having to dedicate personnel, vehicles, and equipment to this task. And if cops can't get this location info from in-dash systems, they can probably grab it from the drivers' cell phone service providers.
Law enforcement may find encryption to be slowing things down in terms of accessing cell phone contents, but everything else -- from in-car electronics to the Internet of Things -- is playing right into their hands.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...15-years.shtml
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The Fictitious Economy: Hiding How The Economy Really Works
By Sharmini Peries
Michael Hudson, author of the newly released J is for Junk Economics, says the media and academia use well-crafted euphemisms to conceal how the economy really works
SHARMINI PERIES: Michael Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He’s the author of many books including, “The Bubble and Beyond” and “Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents”, “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy,” and most recently, of course, “J is for Junk Economics“.
Michael, your book reminds me of Raymond Williams’ key words. That was an incredible contribution to cultural criticism, a criticism of society and cultural studies as a discipline. And I think your book is going to make a phenomenal contribution to the field of economics. It would be a reference for people to go back, especially students to go back, and look at your version of the definition of these terms and looking at economics from that critical prism. So, my first question to you is really about this book. Why did you write it?
MICHAEL HUDSON: I originally wrote it as an appendix to a book to have been called, “The Fictitious Economy.” That draft was written before the 2008 crisis. My point was that the way the economy is described in the press and in University courses has very little to do with how the economy really works. The press and journalistic reports use a terminology made of well crafted euphemisms to confuse understanding of how the economy works.
In addition to giving key words to explain what’s positive and how to understand the economy, I discuss the misleading vocabulary, the Orwellian double-think used by the media, bank lobbyists and corporate lobbyists to persuade people that austerity and running into debt is the key to wealth, not its antithesis. The aim is to make them act against their own interests, by drawing a fictitious picture of the economy as if it’s a parallel universe.
If you can make people use a vocabulary and concepts that make it appear that when the 1% gets richer, the whole economy is getting richer – or when GDP goes up, everybody is improving – then the people, the 95% who did not improve their position from 2008 to 2016 somehow can be made to suffer from the Stockholm syndrome. They’ll think, “Gee, it must be my fault. If the whole economy is growing, why am I so worse off? If only we can give more money to the top 5% or the 1%, it’ll all trickle down. We’ve got to cut taxes and help them so they can give me a job because as Trump and other people said, Well, I never met a poor person who gave me a job.”
I’ve met a lot of rich people, and instead of giving people jobs when they buy a company, they usually make money for themselves by firing people, downsizing and outsourcing labor. So you’re not going to get the rich necessarily giving you jobs. But if people can somehow think that there’s an association between wealth at the top and more employment, and that you have to cut the taxes on the wealthy because it’ll all trickle down, then they have an upside-down view of how the economy works.
I had written an appendix to the book and that took on a life of its own. If you have a vocabulary that describes how the world and the economy actually work, then one word will lead to another and soon you build up a more realistic picture of the economy. So, I not only discuss words and vocabulary, I discuss some of the key individuals and the key economists who’ve made contributions that don’t appear in the neoliberal academic curriculum.
There’s a reason the history of economic thought is not taught anymore in the universities. If people really read what Adam Smith wrote and what John Stuart Mill wrote, they’d see that Smith criticized the landlords. He said that you’ve got to tax away their rents, because it’s a free lunch. Mill defined rent as what landlords make in their sleep, without working. Adam Smith said that whenever businessmen get together, they’re going to conspire as to how to get money from the public at large – how to do a deal and mislead people that it’s all for society’s good.
This is not the kind of free enterprise that people who talk about Adam Smith explain when they depict him as if he were a tax cutter, an Austrian economist or a neoliberal. They don’t want to hear what he actually wrote. So, my book is really about reality economics. I found that to discuss reality economics, we have to take back control of the language or economic methodology, not use the logic that they use.
Mainstream economists talk as if any status quo is in equilibrium. The subliminal trick here is that if you think of the economy as always being in equilibrium, it implies that if you’re poor or you can’t pay your debt, or you have problems sending your kids to school, that’s just part of nature. As if there isn’t an alternative. That is what Margaret Thatcher said: “There is no alternative.” My book is all about how of course there’s an alternative. But to make an alternative, you need an alternative way of looking at the world. And to do that you, as George Orwell said, you need a different vocabulary.
SHARMINI PERIES: Speaking of vocabulary and euphemistic economic concepts, that’s what’s so unique about this book. It’s not just the words, like in Raymond Williams’, but it’s also about the theory and the concepts that we are tackling. You also talked about businessmen and how they use these terminologies in order to mislead us. So here we have a businessman in office, as President of the United States, who is proposing all kinds of economic reforms supposedly in our favor, in terms of workers. And you know, the big infrastructure projects he is proposing that are supposed to elevate and lift people out of poverty and give them jobs and so on. What is the mythology there?
Cont'd Below
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Cont'd From Above
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you just used the word “reform.” When I grew up, and for the past century, “reform” meant you unionize labor, you protect consumers, and you regulate the economy so that there’s less fraud against consumers. But the word “reform” today, as used by the International Monetary Fund in Greece when it insists on Greek reforms, means just the opposite: You’re supposed to lower wages by 10 or 20%. You cut back the pensions by about 50%. Ideally, you stop paying pensions in order to pay the IMF and other foreign creditors. You stop social spending. So, what you have is an inversion of the traditional vocabulary. Reform now means the opposite of what it meant early in the 20th century. It’s no longer Social Democratic. It’s right wing, anti-labor, pro-financial “reform” to cut back social spending and leave everything in a privatized way to the wealthy, and to the corporate sector.
So reform is the first word that I’d use to illustrate how the meaning has changed as it’s used in the mainstream press. Basically, what the right wing has done in this country is hijack the vocabulary that was developed by the labor movement and by socialist economists for a century. They’ve appropriated it and turned it to mean the opposite.
There are 400 words that I deal with. Many of these words show how the meaning has been turned upside down, to get people to have an upside down view of how the economy works.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/...-really-works/
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This is very important to know - not just about economics but everything. To manipulate the public into believing something that may not withstand scrutiny you must effectively frame the message. All seekers of power do this but the right-wing does it more effectively due to unlimited money, control of certain media and a relentless long-term strategy. And, since there is no opposition party (dems are co-conspiritors in this effort - almost all are phonies) - there are few who try to point out how wrong and dangerous this propaganda is. Those that try are ignored by the establishment, or if they manage to get support, they get whack-a-moled. (Bernie S)
Welfare "Queens," WMD in Iraq, liberals are always wrong, government is the enemy, welfare is always wrong and people on it are parasites, the "free market", and the current emotional and empty slogan...Make America Great Again are all examples of misleading memes created to manipulate: many are taken in by them so they continue to be used.
Protect yourself from being psychologically controlled - be skeptical of everything, read widely especially things you may not agree with, and know "they" are out to get your support and will do anything to get it.
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Russia Hysteria
Those who lived through it or who read history know we have always considered the Soviet Union, now Russia, to be a deadly adversary. Decades of fear, drummed into us from many sources, have made a strong impression, and perhaps for many one that cannot be ameliorated. One of the main results is that any less than hostile opinion about our “enemy” is suspect. Reputations and careers can be affected – or worse.
There is now an atmosphere where accusations regarding Russia are accepted without reservation by almost everyone because we all know they're the “bad guys.” That is not to say they're good friends.
The Democrats blamed Russia for hacking the DNC and the election and thus contributing to Clinton's loss. Never mind that there is still no proof; the NSA has never agreed with others that this happened. Assange said Russia was not involved in the DNC leak and hinted it was an inside job. A DNC staffer, Seth Rich, who was in a major IT position in the DNC was murdered in July of last year. There are no leads currently. The police call it an attempted robbery although nothing was stolen.
With that as a backdrop I offer an interview with Prof. Stephen Cohen, an expert on Russia. It provides his take on the current situation (many others agree with him.) There is so much rampant hysteria by media and both political parties that I felt this post was necessary. When someone or something can be criticized with strong evidence it should happen no matter what their reputation; when potential criticism is not supported by strong, objective evidence it should be stifled no matter who or what would be criticized.
Especially important is what Cohen says beginning around 3:00 in the video. It is frightening and should be taken seriously.
As I said in the post above (3/2), read widely from as many objective and authoritative sources as you can. Don't be an ideologue*. It's the only way to avoid becoming a mindless member of the herd.
*Cohen is essentially a progressive, and criticizes liberals/progressives aggressively here. I respect him for that as well.
https://youtu.be/BciYxlKfHH8
5/30/17
There is an article today on RawStory quoting Cohen saying essentially that there is still no proof that
Trump has done anything (connected to Russia) that deserves condemnation (or more.) I find that, considering all the "smoke" billowing from the reports of ongoing investigations, to be a bit strange. Nevertheless, waiting for real evidence is the right thing to do.
Thorough, objective, non-ideological investigation is the only thing that matters in any contentious dispute or situation with alleged illegality.
We shall see.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/no-f...ussia-charges/
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GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years Of Obamacare Votes Were A Sham
Lee Fang, March 31 2017
It is hard to overestimate the role of the Affordable Care Act in the Republican resurgence.
Over the last seven years, the GOP has won successive elections by highlighting problems with Obamacare, airing more than $235 million in negative ads slamming the law, and staging more than 50 high-profile repeal votes. In 2016 every major Republican presidential candidate, including Donald Trump, campaigned on a pledge to quickly get rid of it.
Now in total control of Congress and the White House, some GOP legislators are saying that the political assault on Obamacare was an exercise in cynical politics, and that an outright repeal was never on the table.
“We have Republicans who do not want to repeal Obamacare,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., on Sirius XM Patriot on Wednesday.
“They may have campaigned that way, they may have voted that way a couple of years ago when it didn’t make any difference,” Brooks continued. “But now that it makes a difference, there seems to not be the majority support that we need to pass legislation that we passed 50 or 60 times over five or six years.”
Likewise, Rep. Pat Meehan, R-Pa., one of the lawmakers who came into power by riding the anti-ACA Tea Party wave in 2010, and who once elected pledged to “repeal, defund, delay, and dismantle Obamacare,” recently conceded in a candid interview with the Delaware County Daily Times that previous repeal efforts were a sham.
Asked if the years of votes against the ACA were simply “ceremonial,” since Republicans knew that any serious repeal bill would be vetoed by President Barack Obama, Meehan responded “yes.”
“I don’t think anyone would quarrel with the idea that they were largely position votes,” Meehan continued. “They were as political as they were anything else because there was a recognition that those were unlikely to be moved.”
Republicans expected Hillary Clinton to win the election last year, and had not planned for being in a position to actually pass a repeal effort this year, said Meehan. But after Trump’s victory, the GOP leadership thought something had to be done on their campaign promises, and that’s why they attempted to move forward with the American Health Care Act.
Other Republican lawmakers have made similar remarks in recent days.
“You know, I think maybe its easier to run on these platitudes, run on a platform like this,” said Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., when asked by local radio station News Talk 1290 if Republicans ran on repeal “simply to get elected or re-elected.”
Bacon, admitting that he supports provisions of the law, including coverage for pre-existing conditions, noted that governing can be very different from campaigning. “Sometimes things sound easier when you’re running,” Bacon added.
Another candid comment came from Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who told reporters last Friday that the dozens of repeal votes were cast in the past without any plan for viable legislation.
“Sometimes you’re playing fantasy football and sometimes you’re in the real game,” Barton told Talking Points Memo.
“We knew the president, if we could get a repeal bill to his desk, would almost certainly veto it. This time we knew if it got to the president’s desk it would be signed.”
Even House Speaker Paul Ryan, shortly after his legislation to overhaul the health care system was pulled from a vote, said that Republicans weren’t ready to meet promises on repealing and replacing Obamacare — an implicit concession that previous repeal votes were merely symbolic.
“We were a 10-year opposition party, where being against things was easy to do,” Ryan said, adding that his party wasn’t prepared to be the “governing party.”
“We will get there,” Ryan added, “but we weren’t there today.”
After the defeat of Ryan’s legislation last week, the speaker called Obamacare the “law of the land” that will remain “for the foreseeable future.”
Following the embarrassing admission, conservative donors and some White House officials have mounted a campaign to revive a repeal effort, though there are few details about the type of repeal effort would muster support among the hard-right conservatives and moderates who sank the last attempt.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/31/...tes-obamacare/
(recordings in the link)
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Anyone who is knowledgeable about political games knows that what turned out to be "Obamacare" was a Heritage Foundation creation that morphed into Romneycare in Massachusetts. That's right - a conservative created, business-oriented, giveaway to the healthcare industry was adopted by the "liberal" Obama administration. A complete joke on the American people used by Obama and conservatives to play us all.
Now, the complete lie comes out. Why would conservatives want to fight a CONSERVATIVE plan. Answer - they never did. It was to show their "concern" for the people (and fundraise) and to fight that nasty "socialist" Obama. All of it bullshit.
Anyone that believes any Republican, conservative or libertarian has any interest in the people is deluded. Anyone that thinks more than 20% of Democrats have any interest in the people is deluded.
Know that this is not the only reason for contempt. There are hundreds of examples over just the last 20 years that show that neither party is to be trusted on ANYTHING, especially now.
The game is totally rigged and we are the suckers at the table thinking any of them give a shit!
This has never been more true and you should be concerned that a comedian has been one of the few to publicly tell you the truth.
https://youtu.be/rsL6mKxtOlQ
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The Alleged Sarin Gas Attack and...
There is evidence, contributed by many with intelligence backgrounds, that the gas attack in Syria recently was not what is being widely reported. It's true, as Chris Hedges' book title says, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning; there are many with motives working to mislead the public.
Here is an article that provides a succinct analysis of the situation and one that you are not likely to see from the corporate/neocon media.
Hubris And Dysfunction In Trumpland
by John Wight
In decades to come historians will identify this past week as one of the most seminal in post war history, placing particular emphasis when they do on the actions of one of the most unstable, unpredictable and capricious presidents ever to occupy the White House.
Those who, prior to Trump’s election, allowed themselves to believe his lack of political experience and ideologically-driven worldview were strengths that would go a long way to giving birth to the multipolar world that is long overdue, those people have reason to be nursing a sense of crushing disappointment over the political disaster that is currently unfolding, one that may well translate into a military disaster if allowed to continue on its current trajectory.
Indeed, it is hard at this stage to avoid the feeling that Trump and his administration are actually itching for military confrontation with Russia. Like a child discovering matches for the first time, the 45th president appears a leader who after ordering a missile strike for the first time can’t wait to order more.
It is a feeling reinforced by the meeting between US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, which sadly was not the success a planet desperate for peace and stability was hoping for. Despite the cordial tone and atmosphere surrounding the talks, they ended with no resolution and no serious moves towards de-escalation.
The Trump administration continues to assert that its intelligence leaves no room for doubt when it comes to the allegation that President Assad authorized a sarin gas attack on civilians in Syria’s opposition-held Idlib province. The Syrian leader denies the allegation, and Russia supports this denial, while calling for an independent UN-led investigation in order to ascertain the facts. Washington has so far refused to countenance such an investigation, while at the same time failing to produce the intelligence or evidence it claims to possess in support of its allegations.
Even without factoring in the cooked-up and falsified intelligence that was used to unleash hell on Iraq in 2003, a conflict the after effects of which lie at the root of the current crisis – and even without factoring in the destruction of Libya in 2011, driven by the same regime change fanaticism – the stance of the Trump administration is both unconscionable and contemptuous in its arrogance. It begs the question of what the US Government is afraid of when it comes to an independent investigation? And why the refusal to reveal its evidence and the intelligence that points to Syrian government responsibility for this alleged attack?
The most optimistic analysis we can make at this point is that Trump believes he can wheel and deal in the political arena as he has throughout his years in the business arena. But the consequences of having his bluff called in the game he’s playing now, as opposed to the game he cut his teeth in, are of an entirely different dimension. The game his administration is playing now carries with it the strong possibility of unleashing catastrophic consequences.
The growing number of voices within the US that are questioning the conclusions being peddled by the White House over this alleged Syrian chemical weapons attack have thus far been dismissed as the product of conspiracy theory and pro-Assad propaganda. However the latest intervention by MIT professor Theodore Postol cannot be so easily ignored. Professor Postol, whose exhaustive rebuttal of the case against the Syrian government over the alleged sarin attack of 2013 should be required reading for anyone interested in drawing fact-based conclusions rather than those rooted in ideology, has raised his voice again, this time challenging the intelligence behind these allegations and the intelligence used to support them.
Despite the lack of UN authorization or congressional approval for the airstrike launched by Trump against Syria, the mainstream media in the US, almost to a newspaper and network, has lined up behind their President with their by now customary Pavlovian cheerleading for war and regime change. Their ranks have been swelled by what can best be described as a left wing of US imperialism in the form of a hodgepodge of soi disant socialists and progressives, whose metamorphosis into the most passionate of regime change fanatics and cranks has been stunning to behold.
Moscow, nobody should need reminding, will not accept its implied status of Carthage to Washington’s Rome, with the cards Trump has dealt Russia this past week those of a leader who has made the mistake of allowing himself become dizzy with the questionable success of one limited military action.
Yet, regardless, overnight this missile strike has transported Trump from bête noire of the neocon establishment to its man of the hour. This is in spite of the fact that the incoherence and mixed messages that have ensued during the course of this crisis from Trump’s aforementioned Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, UN envoy Nikki Haley, and woefully under qualified press secretary Sean Spicer, reveals a level of dysfunction commonly associated with satire rather than the serious business of government. The result is that Washington is currently a lumbering giant staggering blindly towards the edge of a cliff with no sign of stopping.
This is why it is such a pity that we have in the White House a President who takes pride in never reading books. For if he did, and if he took the time to dip into the works of Napoleon Bonaparte, he might learn something. For instance: “International incidents must not be allowed to shape foreign policy, foreign policy must shape the incidents.”
Napoleon, it should be borne in mind, was a leader who also made the fatal mistake of allowing hubris to cloud his judgement.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/...-in-trumpland/