Add to all of that territorial disputes, and the outright Anschluss of Crimea. Putin had a huge motive to get Trump elected when it comes to those. Trump has given every indication that he doesn’t care about Russia attempts to expand its empire — and, yes, America has expanded its empire for two centuries. But two wrongs don’t make a right, etc. Trump also showed opposition to NATO during the campaign. It’s as if Putin were speaking through him at times.

From my perspective, the only way to get from A to B along the path you’ve chosen is to assume Clinton is Caligula, without one whit of intelligence or common sense. If people want to think of her as evil, that’s up them. But it stretches all the bounds of credulity to believe she would risk life in prison to do what you and others suggest, when there were so many much safer options.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.

zn wrote:

Mackeyser wrote:

And yes, when a former British diplomat goes PUBLIC that he received the data and personally handed the information to the folks at Wikileaks… that’s the kind of proof one needs. Everything he said fits the facts perfectly.

So… it’s clear that either Seth Rich did it or had to be party to it due to the level of access required to access all of those emails… And not long after the emails come out?

I don;t buy this narrative. A brit diplomat says he received data from an american. And yet he does not himself say that the DNC guy who delivered this info to HIM (cause that’s what a staffer type would do, seek out a british diplomat, right?) was in fact murdered.

Meanwhile Trump himself says that the evidence indicates there was Russian involvement in the election. Including hacking. And if saying that’s a conspiracy then all 17 USA intel agencies are in on it…because? (?)

Yep.

The general agreement between those agencies is, to me, a big tell. Historically, they can’t stand each other. The infighting between the various agencies has been ongoing for decades, and it got worse after 9/11. In the rare times they come together for at least a rough consensus, I think it’s a pretty safe bet there’s fire behind the smoke. And that has nothing to do with an acceptance of their overall mission, or withholding condemnation for past wrongs, etc. etc. One can remain opposed to all of that and still see they can get data collection right.

I also don’t buy the narrative that they’re all in cahoots with the Clintons. The evidence just doesn’t support this. They’re not liked enough for that, except by their own team and supporters. In general, the military, police and intel communities have always viewed Dems with great suspicion, if not outright contempt . . . all too often seeing them as “far left” or “radical,” even though the reality is quite different. They don’t see them as we leftists do. They don’t see the Clintons, the Obamas, the Dems as centrists or center-right on most issues.

Beyond all of that, sometimes a soup can is just a soup can.

Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans. 1962. MOMA.

And, Mac,

I say all the above as someone who voted for Stein, can’t stand the Clintons, or the Dems, or the GOP, wants the duopoly destroyed, and the capitalist system wiped out and replaced with a fully democratized alternative we all own directly, together, equally, cooperatively.

It’s no defense of Clinton to say that some accusations against her are fringe, absent one iota of proof, and these distract from the real things, the actually existing things the Clintons and the Dems have done which deserve our focus and our condemnation.

She and the DNC did screw Sanders, for instance. But it’s huge leap from that to say she had one of her campaign workers murdered.

Again, it’s shitting where you eat and work, and the powers that be tend to avoid that like the plague.

Zooey wrote:

And a small nugget

more on her desire to advance “God’s Kingdom” in education.

Betsy DeVos: American Schools Should Advance ‘God’s Kingdom’

When asked about spending taxpayer dollars on private and religious schools, DeVos declared:
There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education…[versus] what is currently being spent every year on education in this country…Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s Kingdom.

Zooey,

Personally, I despise the idea of anyone being forced into religious indoctrination. This may sound extreme, but I think home-schooling of the young, using this method, is a form of child-abuse. If adults want immerse themselves in religion, that’s up to them. But I think it’s just immoral to force that on kids. It robs them of the freedom to choose their own vision of the spiritual.

DeVos takes this to a national level, and then she goes even further. Not only is this being done to cram religion down people’s throats, it’s also being done by a billionaire who wants the rich to receive vouchers that pay for this.

It’s class warfare by the rich against the rest of us, and religious warfare by the dominant religion against everyone who wants freedom to choose their own spiritual path in life. And those who haven’t even figured out yet that they should have that freedom . . .

I think the blogger is projecting and jumping to confusions. Obama didn’t say what he thinks he said:

Here’s the full transcript of his press conference:

Obama’s Last News Conference: Full Transcript and Video JAN. 18, 2017

(From the NYT)
______
______

And here’s the blogger’s main assertion:

Three U.S. Intelligence Agencies (CIA, NSA and FBI) claim that IT-Systems of the Democratic National Committee were “hacked” in an operation related to the Russian government. They assert that emails copied during the “hack” were transferred by Russian government related hackers to Wikileaks which then published them.

President Obama disagrees. He says those emails were “leaked”.

Wikileaks had insisted that the emails it published came from an insider source not from any government. The DNC emails proved that the supposedly neutral Democratic Party committee had manipulated the primary presidential elections in favor of the later candidate Hillary Clinton. This made it impossible for the alternative candidate Bernie Sanders to win the nomination. Hillory Clinton, who had extremely high unfavorable ratings, lost the final elections.

The President of the United States disagrees with those Intelligence Services. He says that the DNC emails were “leaked”, i.e. copied by an insider, and then transferred to Wikileaks. (At the time around the leaking the DNC IT-administrator Seth Rich was found murdered for no apparent reason in the streets of Washington DC. The murder case was never solved.)

Here is President Obama in his final press conference yesterday:

First of all, I haven’t commented on WikiLeaks, generally. The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether Wikileaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC emails that were leaked.

The DNC emails “that were leaked” – not “hacked” or “stolen” but “leaked”.

_____

Obama is talking about the leaks AFTER the hack. The disagreement here isn’t between those who believe it was leaked by the DNC, and those who believe it was hacked, then given to Wikileaks, who THEN leaked it. The latter is accepted by Obama and the intelligence community. They don’t question that this is what happened. Obama is just saying it’s not absolutely confirmed yet who did the hacking, or how the info got from the hackers to Wikileaks.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.

Zooey,

Those are difficult choices. I have no idea who is the worst of the worst, or who will wreak the most havoc.

Probably Tillerson and Pruitt. But I don’t see any of them not harming Americans and the planet.

One additional thing to note about Betsy Devos. Her brother is Eric Prince, of Blackwater fame. Not sure if you saw this article, but I’ll repost link here, from Jeremy Scahill:

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/17/notorious-mercenary-erik-prince-is-advising-trump-from-the-shadows/

Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Trump From the Shadows
Jeremy Scahill

2017-01-17

WV,

I know this is damn annoying, and I don’t want to be a nudge, but that website is owned by the John Birch Society. It’s not exactly the most objective source for news about Clinton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_American

And the New York Observer is owned by, guess who?

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Observer

___

I just googled the story and all the links are to right-wing sites. To each their own, but I’ll wait for media reports with less of an axe to grind on this particular issue.

Beyond that, IMO, there’s a ton of bigger fish to fry when it comes to things the Clintons have done wrong. You’ve posted a ton of really good articles on those bigger fish.

Another key factor: Bill Clinton’s sexual history. In my view, the Access Hollywood tape bombshell would have sunk Trump for good if not for Bill. In enough people’s minds, they said “Both sides do it!” and it (basically) cancelled out Trump’s history of sexual assault.

I don’t think it should have done that, but it did, IMO. And if the Dems had run a candidate without that kind of baggage, the spotlight remains on Trump. He doesn’t get to shift it to his opponent.

But, again, I don’t think the Dems have learned a thing from any of this. And zooming out further to just generalized strategy . . . . They have no room to grow to their right. The GOP owns that. It’s a done deal. So the Dems are wasting their time courting more of the right.

They’re only “growth opportunity” is to their left. Which means a massive about face, the implementation of truly “progressive” policies at least, and authentic, genuine, honest to goddess outreach to their left.

Another solid analysis of why the Dems lost and what they need to learn from that:

Democrats can’t win until they recognize how bad Obama’s financial policies were He had opportunities to help the working class, and he passed them up. By Matt Stoller January 12

Excerpt:

First, he saved the financial system. A financial system in collapse has to allocate losses. In this case, big banks and homeowners both experienced losses, and it was up to the Obama administration to decide who should bear those burdens. Typically, such losses would be shared between debtors and creditors, through a deal like the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s or bankruptcy reform. But the Obama administration took a different approach. Rather than forcing some burden-sharing between banks and homeowners through bankruptcy reform or debt relief, Obama prioritized creditor rights, placing most of the burden on borrowers. This kept big banks functional and ensured that financiers would maintain their positions in the recovery. At a 2010 hearing, Damon Silvers, vice chairman of the independent Congressional Oversight Panel, which was created to monitor the bailouts, told Obama’s Treasury Department: “We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis, or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.”

Second, Obama’s administration let big-bank executives off the hook for their roles in the crisis. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) referred criminal cases to the Justice Department and was ignored. Whistleblowers from the government and from large banks noted a lack of appetite among prosecutors. In 2012, then-Attorney General Eric Holder ordered prosecutors not to go after mega-bank HSBC for money laundering. Using prosecutorial discretion to not take bank executives to task, while legal, was neither moral nor politically wise; in a 2013 poll, more than half of Americans still said they wanted the bankers behind the crisis punished. But the Obama administration failed to act, and this pattern seems to be continuing. No one, for instance, from Wells Fargo has been indicted for mass fraud in opening fake accounts.

Third, Obama enabled and encouraged roughly 9 million foreclosures. This was Geithner’s explicit policy at Treasury. The Obama administration put together a foreclosure program that it marketed as a way to help homeowners, but when Elizabeth Warren, then chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, grilled Geithner on why the program wasn’t stopping foreclosures, he said that really wasn’t the point. The program, in his view, was working. “We estimate that they can handle 10 million foreclosures, over time,” Geithner said — referring to the banks. “This program will help foam the runway for them.” For Geithner, the most productive economic policy was to get banks back to business as usual.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

I agree with some of that article, but I think Pilger, just like so many recent articles from assorted lefties, makes several strange leaps in logic and aims his rhetorical guns on the oddest targets.

George Clooney? Really? That’s like what we heard from so many voices on the right during the Bush years, when they’d pick some nugget from a talk show host and hold it up as somehow representative of “the left.”

Or Oates? To me, if a black writer wants to say good things about Obama, the first black president, after 43 white guys, many of whom owned slaves, I can’t get worked up about it. Sorry.

I also find it bizarre that he picks a fight with the Writers Resist group. Me? I’m damn happy to see any kind of vocalized rejection of Trump. Would I rather see this as an across the board rebellion against mass inequality and the capitalist system? Definitely. But some protest is better than “shut up and clap louder,” and that seems to be what Pilger would prefer, when it comes to Trump’s coronation.

Beyond that, isn’t Pilger guilty of the same thing he says “liberals” are doing? Isn’t he all too narrow in his own focus? Where is the broad-based class analysis of our government, which would certainly have to include Republicans, including Trump? Did Obama do all of these things all by himself? Did he start these Deep State assaults? All I see is him lashing out at one part of the monstrosity, while ignoring the other and worse part — and, by extension, suggesting we just shut up about Trump altogether. Cuz, well, apparently, according to some leftists, being critical of Russia, Trump and white supremacy is a sign of pickled brains.

—————–
My own view is that i agree with everything Pilger says about Obama,
but over the last couple months I’ve found him to be too cozy with Trump.

To me, saying Obama is a mass murderer is accurate. Same with Bush. Same with Clinton. Same with Reagan. Etc.

But for some reason Pilger sometimes writes like he thinks Trump will be different. I think Trump will be the same or worse.

w
v

Agreed. That makes sense.

Also, I’m glad he mentioned William I Robinson. Will look him up, definitely. Had never heard of him and I like that passage.

Also, have read two books by Eagleton. He does a really nice job debunking myths about Marx and Marxism in his Why Marx was Right.

I just don’t get it. Pilger gives great reasons for condemning the duopoly and I agree with them. At the same time, he’s mocking the idea of condemning the incoming duopolist who is highly likely to be even worse. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind about that.

So, again, it would be awesome if people would blast the entire duopoly and the Deep State behind it, along with the economic system they protect and defend. Ironically, Pilger doesn’t. He goes after only one part of it too, while condemning others who do the same.

They just have different targets.

MLK was a leftist, not a liberal. He considered himself a Democratic Socialist, in the Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington vein. In some ways, more radical than both of them. Not a Franz Fanon, by any means. But radical enough.

It kills me when I see Republicans trying to claim him for the right. He detested the conservative vision, especially when it came to capitalism, inequality, Labor, etc. But, as the article mentions, he was no fan of “liberal” complicity, either.

A leftist hero, like Camus, Orwell, Malraux, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Einstein, Helen Keller, Dorothy Day, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin . . . to name a few.

By the way, did you guys see the new Oxfam report? It’s now the case that just eight human beings hold more wealth than the bottom half of the planet (3.6 billion).

Eight humans. Same total as 3.6 BILLION.

Capitalism is evil.

WV,

This just occurred to me as well. In case my response seemed like it ignored your central point about providing context . . . I thought it was implicit in what I said, but now I’m not so sure.

Anyway, in just the same way we need to discuss what Russia did, we also need to discuss the history of American aggression, oppression, exploitation — foreign and domestic — etc. etc. So the article you posted above is essential. We need a gazillion more of them, and for this to be taught in our schools. Historical context everywhere.

Open up all of this to deep analysis and stop hiding from our own history, etc.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Thanks, WV.

But I’m still not getting from that point A to the point B of, basically, Let’s stop talking about what Russia did cuz of our own history

————-
Billy i have never once said “stop talking about what russia did”. I said “put it in context”. Thats all. PUT…it…in…context. The MSM rarely if ever does that, as you know.

Russia hacked, and tried to influence the election. Indeed. They did.
(we do NOT know if they supplied Assange with the email info — we have no specific EVIDENCE of exactly WHAT russia hacked and how they did it and what they did with the true and accurate info)

Along with the ‘context’ of history there is the context of what exactly certain elements in the CIA/MSM are trying to accomplish with their spin on the hacking stories. Why are certain things emphasized and certain things suppressed or ommitted. Its pretty obvious to many of us that certain elements in the CIA/MSM are taking Trump to the woodshed and trying to establish their power.

Gangsters-states are not pretty, are they. Trump. Hillary. Obama. CIA. NSA. Russia. Capitalism. Mega-Corpse. MSM. Propaganda. Banks. Fed. …its like making sausage — not pretty to see it all smushed-together, up close.

w
v

WV, I know you’re not saying this, but some of the articles decrying the focus on Russia seem to be. That seems to be their main point. We can’t discuss this stuff because of our own despicable history. And, yes, it’s despicable. Again, I think it very likely covers far more of the earth than Russia’s attempts, and likely generated far more violence. Some may argue otherwise, but it’s at least as bad as theirs.

But where do we go from there? What is the way forward? And we also should take into consideration that it’s pretty “natural” for every country to place more import on what other countries do to them than what they do to other countries. I don’t think you’re going to find too many cases of the reverse.

I was thinking about that last night when I watched my team, the Terps, play Illinois. We take sides. A “bad call” on our guys is met with one reaction, while a “bad call” on the other side is met with, “meh.” Or, “they deserved it!!”

That basically is the foundation for how we view the battle of the gangster-states, too. So, again, how do we go forward from there? I don’t have a clue.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.

Thanks, WV.

Very good article. The US, in order to protect, defend and extend the rule of Capital has engaged in horrific acts for a long, long time. That’s what it does. And, if memory serves, Kinzer is a very good historian of this stuff.

But I’m still not getting from that point A to the point B of, basically, Let’s stop talking about what Russia did cuz of our own history.

It’s kinda like saying (on a wholly different plane of existence, of course): We can never talk about any dirty plays against the Rams, because the Rams have engaged in that at other times. Or, because a kid in our neighborhood beat up a kid from another neighborhood, we can’t talk about the reverse happening.

And I also don’t see the “howls of anti-Russian rage” that many critics say they hear. With exceptions, I think the reaction to this stuff is actually a bit weak and too late. It should have been a bipartisan issue going back months before the election, and if the Media really were in Clinton’s pocket, it would have been a major, ongoing story. It wasn’t. We know now that several news outlets sat on much of this until after the election.